Carbon Management with DOE's Dr. Jen Wilcox

Carbon

Nov 27

Dr. Jen Wilcox serves as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM). Dr. Wilcox, an expert in carbon capture, authored the seminal textbook 'Carbon Capture' in 2012. Currently on leave as the presidential distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, she also serves as a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, leading their carbon removal program.

In this conversation, we dive into Dr. Wilcox's transition from academia to the Department of Energy and explore the changing mandates under the Biden and Harris Administration. Key topics include direct air capture technologies, underground sequestration, and CO2 storage. The episode also touches on point source capture, technology advancements, tax credits, and incentives for carbon capture, including the extension of 45Q tax credits. Dr. Wilcox provides insights into the commercialization progress for carbon capture, market evolution, and the recent FECM carbon dioxide removal purchase pilot prize.

The discussion covers the power and heat requirements of direct air capture (DAC) and point source capture, along with solutions for reducing atmospheric levels of other greenhouse gases, including methane. This is a jam-packed episode that at times, hits topics at a macro level and at other times swoops down deep into technical descriptions of DAC chemistries. Whether you're exploring a career in carbon capture or actively developing technology solutions, there's something for everyone in this episode.

Get connected:
Dr. Jen Wilcox X / LinkedIn
Cody Simms X / LinkedIn
MCJ Podcast / Collective / Instagram

*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on Oct 24, 2023 (Published on Nov 27, 2023)

In this episode, we cover:

[04:13]: Origins of Dr. Wilcox's 2012 book, Carbon Capture
[06:16]: Progress of carbon capture technology over the past decade
[12:32]: The transition from the Office of Fossil Energy to the Fossil Energy and Carbon Management
[24:32]: Overview of direct air capture technologies and chemistries
[32:29] Comparison of liquid vs solid sorbents for direct air capture
[37:37]: Description of EPA's well classification system
[44:36]: Point source capture and the state of carbon capture tech for industrial emissions
[53:00]: Extension of 45Q tax credits to incentivize carbon capture
[56:21]: DOE's first carbon dioxide removal purchase pilot
[58:34]: Considerations around power needs for direct air capture
[01:02:10]: Tech for direct air capture of methane and other non-CO2 GHGs
[01:05:28]: Dr. Wilcox’s parting words on the need to rapidly scale up durable carbon removal solutions

Cody Simms (00:00:00):
On today's episode of My Climate Journey, our guest is Dr. Jen Wilcox, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, or FECM. Dr. Wilcox is an expert in carbon capture, having written the first textbook on the subject called Carbon Capture in 2012. She's currently on leave as the presidential distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, as senior fellow at World Resources Institute, Dr. Wilcox led WRI's carbon removal program. Among her many contributions to the space, she also edited the CDR primer on carbon dioxide removal in 2021, which has been a key entry point publication for countless climate technologists. In our conversation, we discuss her transition from academia into the Department of Energy and how the DOE and FECs mandate changed with the advent of the Biden and Harris Administration. We talk about direct air capture and some of the key technologies that are being refined and we discuss the evolution of underground sequestration and CO2 storage.
(00:01:23):
We talk about point source capture and the state of technology for capturing industrial emissions, and we discuss tax credits and incentives for carbon capture, including the extension of 45Q tax credits for direct air capture and point source capture, as well as the pathways for other forms of carbon capture to receive federal incentives. We touch on commercialization progress for carbon capture and how markets are evolving around these technologies and including the voluntary carbon markets as well as industrial purchasers of captured CO2.
(00:01:57):
We discuss FECMs recently announced carbon dioxide removal purchase pilot prize, a pool of $35 million set aside by DOE to purchase captured carbon directly, which is a continued evolution of the DOE strategy. We talk about the power and importantly, heat needs of DAC and point source capture, and we talk about solutions for capturing or reducing atmospheric levels of other greenhouse gases in including methane. This is a jam packed episode that at times, hits topics at a macro level and at other times swoops down deep into technical descriptions of DAC chemistries. And given the breadth we cover, I am certain there are elements of this conversation that will appeal to you whether you are just exploring how you can work in carbon capture or whether you are actively developing technology solutions today yourself. I appreciate Dr. Wilcox for being so generous with her time and I greatly enjoyed learning from her. But before we start...
(00:03:03):
I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (00:03:04):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:06):
And I'm Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (00:03:12):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:03:17):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Jen, welcome to the show.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:03:32):
Thank you.
Cody Simms (00:03:33):
Well, I am so excited to have you on here. Your reputation obviously precedes you when it comes to so many of the topics we're about to discuss. I contacted quite a few founders who are building in carbon removal prior to our conversation and said, "Hey, I'm about to do a recording with Dr. Jen Wilcox. What should I ask?" And I got inundated with questions. I also hit up our member community and got questions there too. So I'm going to try to weave those into my storyline, but know that a number of the questions that are getting asked today are coming from builders in the space who are following your work and excited to hear your point of view on how things are evolving.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:04:12):
Sounds great.
Cody Simms (00:04:13):
The first question I have, which did come from one of those founders is you authored the first book on carbon capture, literally called Carbon Capture in 2012. And if you could see where we are now 11 years later in 2023, if you looked in the future, what do you think you would think?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:04:34):
Back in 2012, even the reason for authoring that book, I started in this field in 2008 and started teaching a course on carbon capture and just realized there wasn't a single source to go to for students. I was just collecting papers from the peer-reviewed literature. I'll tell you, I read 40 textbooks while writing the book on carbon capture because it's such an interdisciplinary field across engineering and sciences and applied sciences. And so it was just really key to be able to have an instrument to teach a broad audience of students excited about this space and recognizing too, that it's a critical solution to getting to net-zero, not just carbon removal from the atmosphere, but also avoiding carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere to begin with and if it's truly going to be deployed at the scale that we need it to, we need people that are educated in this space.
(00:05:36):
That's really why I ended up writing that book, which took a couple of years. And there is a thread of direct air capture specifically throughout the book. Given CO2 is so dilute in the atmosphere, it's just a really hard problem, but it's technically feasible, which is why we're able to do it today. But I always wanted to bring it back to that comparison. So when you look at a concentrated source or even a medium concentration source of CO2, recognizing that if we have technology to avoid the emissions in the first place, it's always going to be easier than having to take it back out of the air. And so that's really why there was a threat of that comparison to direct air capture throughout.
Cody Simms (00:06:16):
And if you're 2012 self, if she could have jumped forward in time to today, what do you think she would think about where we are in 2023?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:06:24):
Today, be very excited. I would say it only just started to change significantly in the last couple of years in terms of progress. If you look at say before the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed, we actually had some pretty just steady progress when it comes to direct air capture over a decade with just a couple of companies, couple of technologies really pushing forward trying to make it work no matter what the costs because they're founded by scientists and engineers and actually, physicists, that are passionate about climate and recognizing it's a critical tool. And so really just invested deeply in this space. But that was what was driving the progress in terms of direct air capture.
(00:07:13):
And so the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed and just really excited about that opportunity to be able to build out the first of a kind direct air capture hubs. And then just before that though, in my role here at DOE super exciting, we got to launch the carbon negative shot, which is an energy earth shot, and that was pooling the resources that we had through just base annual appropriations and DOE budget, which was steadily growing in the space of carbon removal more broadly.
(00:07:46):
And so when I first started, I got to help shape that earth shot, which for me was pretty exciting. And so from 2012 to 2018, I would say that things were pretty slow moving. And then in 2018, I gave a TED Talk in Vancouver on the topic of direct air capture, and I asked the question, what if we could invest in this approach in a way that would enable private sector broad scale deployment? What would that look like? What would that number look like? And it was just imagining. So then fast-forward into January 2021, to be in the position those three years was just a vision, a dream in 2018. And then being able to actually implement that to me was the most powerful. So on the stage where we launched the carbon negative shot was at COP, in I believe December 2021. That was probably the most surreal moment because I was living out the vision that I had hoped for in 2018.
(00:08:53):
That's a long answer, but I would say it's really over these last few years that I'm just excited about the progress that we've been making and that progress comes from investing. And I'll also say with the direct air capture hubs, we have $3.5 billion in infrastructure law, but the only approaches that are ready for demonstration today are those ones that were born out of 2008. And so when you look at though, the portfolio of emerging technologies in the space at all different levels of technological readiness, that's also the exciting piece, that we get to invest in a way that we're shepherding the new research along a pipeline that's ultimately going to get to demonstration. That's the exciting part for me right now.
Cody Simms (00:09:43):
I'm going to spend a bunch of time with you talking about some of those different emerging technologies that are growing up alongside direct air capture. Before we do, one thing that I noticed in one of your talks I was watching before our conversation today was as recently as 2015, direct air capture was bundled together with geoengineering or I should say carbon removal in general, was bundled together with geoengineering. It wasn't thought of as being bundled with energy or with proactive climate management, I suppose.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:10:13):
Absolutely. So a lot of folks reflect on the National Academy of Sciences study that was released in 2019 because it got a lot of attention because it was a blueprint for the federal government, which I leveraged and used for our carbon negative shot build out. But rewind a little bit. In 2015 we had another Academy of Sciences report, but it was two reports. And so we were asked to think about geoengineering and we had a mix of experts in the room that were coming from traditional, and I'll talk about that, geoengineering. And then there were folks like me that were more in the carbon removal space. And so we recognized the risks of these approaches are actually quite different. The unintended impacts are quite different. Maybe we shouldn't bundle these things because when somebody talks about geoengineering, they automatically go to injecting particles into the stratosphere to induce cooling.
(00:11:08):
And it's like, well, that's really different than planting trees in a durable way. And so we collectively decided as a group, that team that was brought together for the Academy of Sciences, to remove the concept of geoengineering from the entire framework, to recognize that there's two knobs that one can turn to impact climate change. One is changing the reflectivity of the earth, albedo modification. The second one though is pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, just removing the greenhouse gases and so not just CO2 but could be methane, greenhouse gas removal in general. And so we decided to write two reports, and it took us a long time to figure out, well, if we're not going to use the phrase geoengineering, we're not going to put these two climate tools under the same framework, what are we going to call it? And that was a fun discussion over a couple of days and we finally all agreed on climate intervention because these are tools where we're trying to intervene with the changing climate, and so, one knob being albedo modification and the other being carbon removal.
Cody Simms (00:12:19):
So climate intervention is the superset of what we now know as carbon removal and what we also think of as geoengineering, I guess?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:12:28):
It didn't stick though. Nobody uses it, but I use it. I like it.
Cody Simms (00:12:32):
There we go. You've done a pretty good job of creating branding frameworks in many other areas of the climate space, so keep pushing at it. Right? On that note, you said, hey, the progress has been steady, steady, steady, and then all at once. And one of those all at once moments that feels obvious in retrospect, was a pretty big deal, which was the office of FECM moving from just being FE from Fossil Energy, which was what the group did before to Department of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. That's a small thing, but I'm sure that was a big change to implement. Can you describe those early days of the new administration and the shifting focus areas and what that felt like?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:13:20):
I definitely said no to the position not really knowing what I was getting into, I'll just say. And I didn't know a lot about the Office of Fossil energy. On the outside, I was always more engaged with energy efficiency and renewable energy, the Office of Science. It was new to me coming in and looking at the mission when I started, which was just off of the Trump Administration, the focus was really on how can we produce fossil energy in a way that's cheaper and easier and making sure that everybody of course has access and energy security. These were the underlying principles. What I did in that first year was dig deep and recognize, we have to look at all these investments across the broader space of fossil energy at that time. And then recognized it was an exciting time because we have the Biden Harris Administration, which put forth a couple of initiatives that were pretty significantly different from the previous administration.
(00:14:14):
One being a net-zero greenhouse gas goal by mid-century, another one being the Justice40 initiative, which means looking at our investments that lead to benefits specifically in disadvantaged communities. So recognizing fossil energy and the legacy of oil and gas and coal production and the use has to do with those communities. We ask the question of how do our investments align and square with the goals of the administration? And at the same time, our budget comes from not the administration, but from Congress. How do you thread that needle? What does that look like? So we made a decision to flip the mission completely upside down, which means recognizing that first and foremost, everybody needs to have access to energy and even the United States [inaudible 00:15:08] not everybody has access to energy and certainly not access to affordable energy in an equitable way.
(00:15:13):
And then number three, not everybody has access to clean energy that's affordable. Our feeling was, well, while we're decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels and increasing the ability to rely on renewables and other energy resources, we need to make sure that our reliance on fossil fuels as we continue to recover them from the earth, that we invest in technologies that minimize environmental and climate impacts, and that's our Office of Resource Sustainability, which used to have a name called Oil and Gas. The other piece of that is that recognizing that the legacy of fossil fuel productions, we have a lot of fly ash impoundments. We have acid mine drainage. We still have produced water that we have to be able to process through oil and gas production. So we're looking at these two as opportunities. We have a whole program where we look at separations and critical minerals and rare earth elements from unconventional resources. So you're not thinking about new mining. You're thinking about using these unconventional resources to be able to fuel the clean energy technology and have domestic supply chains.
(00:16:21):
And then the second part was, okay, well we use these fossil fuels and we use them for power generation. We use them to run our cement kilns for cement production. We might use them in producing iron in other different industries. And so that's a downstream pollution. And so carbon management is about retrofitting existing polluting technologies to avoid emissions from entering the atmosphere, but also, recognizing that the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is mostly from the combustion of fossil fuels, and so that's our responsibility too.
(00:17:01):
We broadened and did a lot of teasing out of our divisions to have a separate division specifically on carbon removal so that we could recruit a division director with that expertise. A separate division just on carbon conversion. You've got regions that may not have the good rocks to do deep storage. You might have regions that don't want the pipelines, and so you've got to do something to manage the downstream CO2, so you have carbon conversion. And then separating out carbon storage underground, creating a transport office as well of CO2, not just for pipelines, but for barge or for rail. We really just expanded out these divisions so that we could recruit strategically, hire more people, staff up in these critical areas, and again, broaden the mission space into really managing the carbon across each of these pipelines.
Cody Simms (00:17:52):
And just for my own knowledge, that is such a giant transition to take a division of the government that had primarily been focused on oil drilling and enhanced oil recovery, I'm guessing. Fracking and finding gas underground and transitioning it to, obviously you still have to manage whatever the federal government is doing in those areas, but add this entire mandate around justice as you mentioned, and this entire mandate around managing carbon infrastructure in some way, shape or form while flying the plane of the federal government and presumably many other divisions in the Department of Energy are going through similar types of transitions at the same time. When does this happen? You hear about the transition team after a federal election occurs. When does the groundwork for what these structures are going to look like actually come together?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:18:46):
I started on January 20th, the first day of the administration, as a political appointee. We quickly had to learn about budget, and I quickly learned that you actually coexist in three years at the same time. You're spending current money, you're thinking about the next year and you're thinking about the next year too. Yeah, there was a lot of learning. One of my skills is that I like to collaborate and I recognize that follow the passion, the things that I'm excited about, but I'm not going to force myself if there's something I'm not passionate about. I'd rather go find the person who does it well and work with them together. That was something too, that I started early, is talking to everybody in the other offices and finding out who was doing what. That helped a lot when we changed the names of our divisions. I'll give you one example.
(00:19:34):
One of our offices, we focus on different feed stocks for hydrogen production coupled to carbon management, but things like sustainable biomass waste, converting that to hydrogen with carbon capture, waste plastic as a feedstock, and so these types of feedstocks... But I wanted to call the division clean hydrogen. But when you think about energy efficiency and renewable energy, we have that too in nuclear. We've got that too. And then you start to get into the colors of the pink and the blue and the green of the hydrogen rainbow. It's good to just have those conversations so that you're not duplicating, you're not confusing in messaging in a confusing way, but you're working together in a collaborative way. And even our recent announcement of all the hydrogen hubs is a great example of our teams coming together and working in that way.
Cody Simms (00:20:23):
Thanks for humoring me and just pure curiosity on my part about how this type of change happens. Let's start diving into the area you've spent your whole career working on, which is carbon removal, direct air capture and the like. Maybe start with just how do you categorize CDR, carbon dioxide removal at the macro level? I've had different guests on the show talk about it in different ways. There are so many different processes that are out there that are being explored. How do you think about it in your mind?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:20:54):
I think of the accumulated pool of CO2 in the atmosphere and depending on where you are, somewhere between 410, 420 five parts per million. And when I think of carbon removal, I just think of it as like that. We've got to take it out of the air and it needs to be permanently removed from the air. So the portfolio of approaches, they differ. We can think about planting trees in an area that never had trees. We can think about improving forest management in a way that leads to additional uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere. You can think about soils and advanced agricultural practices that enable more carbon to be stored in soils. The minerals in the earth's crust that are rich in calcium and magnesium naturally react with CO2 in the atmosphere. Can we accelerate that process? Some folks call them terrestrial or nature-based approaches in that framing.
(00:21:48):
The issue with them is that we don't have a way to unilaterally compare them to the more technological or engineered based approaches, which is like using chemicals to take CO2 out of the atmosphere in that engineered way. When you think about a chemicals approach to taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, it feels a little bit more controlled. You're using an approach that's been even piloted at a smaller scale. You have the measurement equipment in place. You know how much, you can quantify the CO2 removed. In fact, we've gone so far as to have a tax credit that got bumped up in the Inflation Reduction Act 45Q. And so we have a process even in the government where we require robust lifecycle accounting and you can quantify the CO2 captured from the air. And then you can also quantify how much gets injected deep underground in a formation.
(00:22:46):
And we've got the Environmental Protection Agency that has developed the monitoring reporting and verification framework of doing that and getting the Class 69/ permit for a well. So all that's beautiful, but the land-based approaches, nobody's drawing a box around them. Nobody's telling us what instruments to use to quantify and we haven't even talked about oceans, but this, the land and the engineered, they're not on the same framework yet. That's one way that I describe these different approaches.
(00:23:17):
You can do all of them and get removal, but the question is what's the timescale of the removal related to the durability of the removal? And so what I'd like to see is all of them being durable because we need them all in order to get to the scale, multiple gigatons potentially. Not to mention it wouldn't hurt if we could make the forest more durable so we don't get that reversibility because we are relying on the forest for uptake in all the climate models anyway. So some of what we're doing is we recognize that gap and we're leveraging our national labs across the United States as that third party not coming in with any bias and thinking about each of these approaches and just outlining what the framework looks like.
(00:24:00):
I don't think it involves developing new measuring tools. They exist. We're pretty good at that, but it's about bringing them together in a way such that applicants, at the end of the day, if it's for a 45Q or something like it, they can show the amount of CO2 captured and the durability of it based upon their approach. And so that's what we're developing now so that hopefully, we can put these on a similar framework and ultimately, have maybe even a better tool than 45Q for the terrestrial based approaches down the road.
Cody Simms (00:24:32):
Let's start with the area you've spent most of your time doing research on, which is direct air capture. Can you give us just the broad 101 overview of direct air capture, the different processes and absorbents and whatnot that make direct air capture work? I've heard you say in a large part, the early research on direct air capture evolved out of industrial point source, smokestack based capture, at least in its initial frameworks. I don't know if that's true or not, but I think I read that from you somewhere. Maybe just describe direct air capture and the challenge therein and some of the solutions that are currently leading the way.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:25:07):
When you think about taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, you recognize there's a lot of nitrogen because it's roughly 410 to 425 or so parts per million depending on your location. Because it's so dilute, I'll just also mention that there's this concept of minimum work, and you might've heard me say something about that before, but what it is, we like to think about how much energy it's going to take and then you think about, well, how are we going to provide the energy to that system? And then you can start to think about costs. That's really like an operating cost. And so when you think about that minimum work, there's three boundary conditions. One is the starting concentration of CO2. You can't control that. It's just what it is in the air. In any place that you're deciding to cite your system, there's only two others that you plug into the equation to estimate what the minimum work is for the given separation of CO2 or purification of CO2.
(00:26:05):
Another one is the amount of CO2 you're going to capture from any volume of space. Are you going to capture 50% of it? Are you going to capture 90%? When you look at the leading technologies today, they tend to optimize. They optimize because you can imagine that the deeper the bed, the more energy it takes to push the air through, and that's called pressure drop. And so you want to be able to have a deep enough bed so that you capture more CO2 because the air is going through more material and it's getting scrubbed and scrubbed the deeper you go into the bed. But the larger the bed, more energy it takes, the more fan power required to push through. So there's an optimization there. The optimization tends to come out to about 60% capture of the volume. You may optimize it to be differently, but that's one aspect.
(00:26:58):
And then the third one that everybody gets hung up on in my opinion, is the purity of the CO2 at the end. When folks do the minimum work calculation and they arrive at 22 kilojoules per mole, that's the number of people like to cite. That's based upon a 99.9% purity of the CO2. That's assuming that you're going to put it in a pipeline, you need to compress it easily for liquid transport. It assumes you're going to inject it deep underground in a geologic formation, super critical phase. But I like to think about starting when we think about the technologies and the separations of CO2, I like to think about playing with that boundary condition. If you don't go to 99%, suppose that at the beginning, rather than thinking about geologic storage, maybe you put it into a catalyst for synthetic fuel chemical or maybe you react it with magnesium to create a synthetic aggregate that could replace concrete or maybe you feed it to algae to create a sustainable aviation fuel.
(00:27:58):
In each of those scenarios, you never have to take the CO2 to 99% purity. You take it from anywhere, believe it or not, from like 5% to 30% and your minimum work goes down from 22 kilojoules per mole to maybe like five and seven kilojoules per mole. You play with that a little bit and I think it's fun because then you can start to think about, huh, I don't need to have that high purity. And the reason I bring that up is because there's only two chemistries out there, and I know there's all these emerging companies, a lot. We just invested $100 million in about 20 emerging direct air capture companies across the United States, but there's two chemistries at the end of the day. There's carbon dioxide reacting with an oxygen atom. The oxygen can be magnesium oxide, calcium oxide, it can be potassium hydroxide. And in that case you're forming a carbonate where the carbon dioxide molecule is now bonded to another oxygen forming a carbonate. So that's one type of chemistry.
(00:29:02):
And the second type of chemistry is a means, but a means are a weaker base. And so if you are trying to do this, you've got all this nitrogen to process and you want your chemistry to see the CO2 to do the capture, the weaker base doesn't tend to work. You need the stronger base, okay? But suppose you develop a new type of framework. And when I talk about how we have the conventional comparison from the first patent was in 1930 by Bottoms and I talk about that first patent and it was amines in a liquid solvent. If you look at the emerging technology today that's using liquid solvent, it's potassium hydroxide, a much stronger base than amines.
(00:29:52):
So, the framework of liquids, we still have that in play, but we couldn't use amines in that system. We're using potassium, a stronger base because CO2 so dilute, so flip it. Back in 1930, they weren't thinking about taking amines and putting them in a metal organic framework. So today they are, and that's for direct air capture. And the reason you do that is because the metal organic framework or any other solid sorbent substrate allows you to have high, high surface area. You can have a gram of this material and you have the surface area of a football field. So what does that mean? We take these materials and we decorate them with a weak base like an amine, it means that the likelihood of this very dilute CO2 and a gas of colliding into the chemistry to bond the carbon nitrogen bond, in this case the carbamate is very high because the surface area is so large and you've tried to cover it with a monolayer of nitrogen or amines. Flip it and go back to the liquid solvent and think about what that looks like.
(00:30:58):
These are structured packing materials and the pore spaces of the packing material because liquid has to flow through is on the order of millimeters versus microns. So you've got three to five orders of magnitude smaller in pore size with the solid solvents versus your structured packing because you need to be able to pump liquid through. If you look at any density of volume in the liquid solvent case, that collision probability is so small compared to the solid solvents. So because of that, you need a very, very strong base like a potassium hydroxide versus the other one, you can get away with a weak base because you get that crazy surface area.
(00:31:46):
Now that's interesting because it means that you might save yourself some energy in terms of that framework. There's all kinds of trade-offs and in the other case, you've got to do a lot of complication. They end up having to do a chemical swing where you use calcium to actually precipitate out, which is a beautiful separation, a crystallization approach to separate out the CO2 by forming a calcium carbonate and then ultimately, having to calcine it like you have to do for cement production to produce the high purity stream of CO2. But that description, and you can't really find that anywhere that description because it was like a back of the envelope calculation that I did to convince myself why we can't use amines liquids for doing direct air capture.
Cody Simms (00:32:29):
Thank you for diving into all of that. I'm going to have to play this back four times to try to make sure I can remotely understand it, but I appreciate it.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:32:36):
It's probably too much.
Cody Simms (00:32:37):
I want to come back to the purity comment you made as one of the trade-offs because I thought that was really a good point. A lot of the buyers today of the outputs of these projects are big tech companies buying on the voluntary carbon markets, whether it's Microsoft, whether it's Frontier, which is a consortium of tech companies and they are buying for super high purity storage as their goal. Your point is, hey, there are many industrial uses for CO2 today. It's used widely as an industrial input mechanism today at something like 60% purity. If it were taken as an industrial input, that presumably doesn't actually solve the problem of sequestration in most cases. It's going to get likely re-released into the atmosphere when it's used, but it bootstraps the technology. Is that your point? It helps the technology move up the maturation cycle?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:33:29):
Well, I would just say though, these processes that I described, they're not at any commercial scale today either. When we take CO2 or carbon monoxide with hydrogen as a feedstock for say making plastics or synthetic fuels, those companies are emerging today too, whether they're electrochemical or photochemical. That's all emerging work that's happening. And then I would say too, you're right, what are you doing with the fuel? You're going to combust it and put the CO2 back in the atmosphere. So it's at best, neutral. But at least you're lessening your dependence on conventional. And then the thing that I would say too about aggregates, once you make the carbonate, it's not that different from the in-situ mineralization that carb fix is doing in Iceland. You're making an aggregate. It takes a lot of energy to reverse that. A lot of heat. And so, and bringing it into the built environment in the form of concrete or road building is interesting to me.
(00:34:24):
The other piece about it is those synthetic aggregates, I think we need to do more to study their properties because there's an adaptation element. Imagine you create materials that have a cooling effect. So these are materials that could be used in roofing. You could imagine not using asphalt, but these materials in road building and in cities and they have an increased reflectivity and so a cooling effect in the built environment, which I think is pretty exciting.
Yin Lu (00:34:49):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective. Here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(00:35:16):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly Women In Climate meetups, Idea Jam Sessions for early stage founders, Climate Book Club art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (00:35:50):
Do you have a prediction for direct air captured CO2? How much of it will eventually be used for pure storage versus how much of it will ultimately find its way as a feedstock into other applications?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:36:07):
I can talk about something that I'm super excited about that's trying to enable making it easier for folks to put it underground. The reason I feel like you see, there's a company that takes the carbon and makes it diamond, my goodness, the amount of pressure that takes to get those carbon atoms in that nice form that we like. It's just a lot of energy and a lot of expense, but the value you get at the end of the day is why they do it. But the scale is so tiny.
(00:36:34):
What we're doing is we have in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $2.5 billion. I know we all get excited about the 3.5 associated with direct air capture hubs and the earth shot enabling, but 2.5 to build out the geologic capacity in the United States and what that number equals, 2.5 billion. What that means is we expect that we can build out at a minimum of 60 to 65 million tons of CO2 injection per year and all across the United States in regions that aren't oil and gas producers, but they have saline aquifers in regions that aren't oil and gas producers necessarily, but there's ultramafic rocks for in-situ mineralization not that different from the basalt formations in Iceland.
(00:37:19):
And so we're investing across all pockets of the United States, and this is called our Carbon Safe program. And the idea there is make it easy for the direct air capture companies. They can cite their companies and their locations and there's an offtake. It's already there.
Cody Simms (00:37:37):
All right. I had these questions further down my list, but let's jump right into them. Describe the different wells and sequestration models for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with class one, class two, class three, class four, all the way to class, six different wells. You don't have to hit all of them, but the ones that are relevant to the work that you are doing and the areas in particular. I think class six is where there's some significant amount of change happening.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:38:00):
I do not work for EPA, but they're close colleagues of ours and they're working very hard right now. And you can see now they have a public online tracker and so you can see how many class six permits are in the queue, which is exciting.
Cody Simms (00:38:15):
So class six is a CO2 injected into a underground saline aquifer specifically. Is that what class six is about?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:38:23):
Yep. So I'll give a quick tutorial on these classes like you asked. And so class two is when we think about CO2 storage via enhanced oil recovery, and so many people misunderstand that. They think yes, the CO2 is being used to produce more oil, true. But the CO2 at the end of the day goes underground. It doesn't come back. When it comes back out, because it costs something, the producer re-injects it and because it's enhanced oil recovery, what that means is the operator has gone to a field that's already been depleted by primary recovery. In other words, just like you drill a well and you produce because it's pressure, this is a tertiary approach where you really are trying to squeeze out every last bit. So it is a storage mechanism.
(00:39:12):
The issue is that a lot of the CO2 that's sourced today for that activity is sourced from natural domes in the earth of CO2 when we need to shift and use more of the anthropogenic. That's one direction to go there. But class two is specifically CO2 storage via enhanced oil recovery. And that's been happening since the 1970s. And in fact, it's that field why we know so much about putting CO2 underground by the way. And so shifting class five is experimental. That could be a shallow formation, a different type of formation that's typically like an experimental. So all of our work through our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is demonstration. And so that would couple to a class five.
Cody Simms (00:39:57):
So this is when you hear of new methods of carbon sequestration, a startup that's pitching an idea. They want to put something underground, whether it's bio oil or something else. That would be a class five well, that presumably they would be looking to inject into.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:40:11):
Class six, that's specific to dedicated storage of CO2. So you're not producing oil. Your sole purpose is putting that CO2 deep underground and you're drilling a well roughly a mile underground well below the water table and drinking water aquifers. And that's dedicated CO2 storage.
Cody Simms (00:40:43):
And these are you said, administered by the EPA is the administer of these and are they-
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:40:47):
The permits for drilling the well.
Cody Simms (00:40:50):
Are they typically privately owned, these wells?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:40:53):
Yeah. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, our Carbon Safe program supports applicants to help and funding all the way through so that it's a four phase process. And so phase one is where you're simply characterizing the formation in the subsurface, understand the permeability, understanding does it have a cap rock so it's not going to leak out? But there's a four stage process where you're shepherding an applicant through. By the time it gets to phase four, that's when... In phase three you're probably applying for a class six permit. Phase four, you're at a point where you have the permit. It's coupled to monitoring, reporting and verification and then you're operating.
Cody Simms (00:41:33):
One other question on the whole sequestration topic while we're here, and then I'm going to go back up to some of the technologies, is pipelines. We have an extensive oil and gas pipeline infrastructure across the US. Do you envision that we will need to build a CO2 pipeline network to transport from these DAC hubs or other DAC projects or other forms of carbon capture projects to these wells wherever they may exist?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:42:02):
We definitely have to build out pipelines, but we're also in our office exploring more than just pipelines. I'm from Maine, so there's not so many good rocks for storing CO2, not even the interesting ones. Certainly no oil and gas, but there's also no saline aquifers and no [inaudible 00:42:18] even.
Cody Simms (00:42:18):
I'm from Kansas. We've got a lot of that stuff.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:42:21):
My goodness. The question though is, well, does it make sense like port to port? Putting it on a barge for instance, and bringing it down to regions that do have some interesting rocks like Delaware or Georgia or something like this, or even funding some characterization work in Florida. And so we're looking at really expanding out.
(00:42:42):
I want to tell you too, we talked before about the EPA in our relationships there. Here, we are strongly coordinated with the Department of Transportation. So one thing DOE doesn't do is we don't regulate the class six. We don't regulate pipelines. We are providing the technical expertise. We're investing in the build out of the infrastructure and we can do everything to help with the communications and the safety and the materials and the messaging. And also, in terms of public versus private, it depends on who owns the land to begin with. Is it forest service land? Is it a private ownership of the land? Is it cooperative? Whether or not something is private at the end of the day or public, it depends on that original ownership. It gets more complicated in the subsurface because there's the pore versus the mineral rights. And so every state is a little bit different. That's out of my area of expertise. I just know that state by state, it's a little different and it's a little more complicated.
Cody Simms (00:43:43):
What I'm hearing and what I'm taking away is obviously, a need for continued innovation in these various carbon capture methods, whether direct air capture or some of the others we've yet to talk about and in depth. There's also a need for innovation in storage and in measurement and reporting and verification and in transportation. And the government isn't going to create these methodologies. They're looking for private entrepreneurs, private markets to create them and then build programs around how to support their development. Is that a good takeaway to have?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:44:15):
It is a good takeaway, but we are also okay in terms of the work we're doing with MRV on carbon removal. We're okay leveraging our lab's expertise to be that third party without skin in the game to really be honest brokers and to really help to develop the framework by which others can stick to.
Cody Simms (00:44:36):
Let's go back up into some of the methodologies. I want to make sure we don't gloss over point source capture because today, it's where the bulk of CO2 is actually flowing, if I understand it, which is in industrial use cases. Can you explain a little bit about point source capture and how it differs from direct air capture and also, roughly orders of magnitude, the volumes flowing through that today relative to what we expect it to look like?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:45:06):
So when you look at the different sectors by which we can think about capturing CO2 at a point source, like avoiding its emissions from the atmosphere, it's complicated. So yes, across the industrial sector, but let's talk about what we've demonstrated today. So during the Recovery Act in the Obama Administration, we have three successful demonstrations. One was CO2 capture from a bioethanol plant, EDM, and then also a class six well in the Mount Simon sandstone. So a wonderful example, but what's true about the fermentation process is that the CO2 is 99%+ purity. And so all you have to do is invest in a compressor and separate out the CO2 from water. That's not rocket science, it's not emerging technology. That's easy. It's off the shelf. And so the fact that that was technologically successful is not surprising. And now we have our bump up in 45Q. So you're going to see a lot more activity in the space of CO2 separation from bioethanol.
(00:46:11):
Next, another second project that was successful was air products. And so air products is where we were looking at hydrogen production from steam methane reforming. And again, in that case, the CO2 is at a bit of a boosted concentration at about 45 to 50% concentration. And the more concentrated the CO2 is, the easier it is to capture. So you can use a pressure swing absorption to do the separation. So that is starting to get into emerging technologies for separation. So that's another project. The third one was the Petra Nova, which is a coal-fired power plant. And in that case you've got a concentration of between 12 and 15% CO2, and you used the traditional amine solvents for separation there. So those are the three demonstrations that we have, for example.
(00:47:00):
Now with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we have roughly $3 billion to spend on six more projects. Four are associated with the power sector, two coal, two natural gas. We have not demonstrated carbon capture technology on a natural gas fired power plant at this scale before. And then the other two are industry, and we haven't demonstrated carbon capture on a cement plant or a steel plant or anything outside of the hydrogen and the bioethanol. And so when you look at these sectors, they're all different. The CO2 concentrations are different. The pollutants, the co-pollutants, that might be when you think about cement, what are they firing in the kiln? It's going to be a mix of coal, gas, maybe tires in some cases, biomass, all kinds of different things. So now the effluent stream that has that CO2 that you're capturing from, maybe it's got SOx, maybe it's got NOx, maybe it's got particulate matter.
(00:47:54):
So what we're trying to do is do better. CCS version 2.0. If you're taking CO2 out of an effluent stream, it's an acid gas and you're using a base to separate it. Well, SOx and NOx are stronger acid gases in CO2, so you got to pull those out too. And so what we're asking applicants is to think about what is the baseline emissions, not just for CO2, of all the pollutants. Is there a way that we can invest our technologies to not just reduce CO2, reduce air pollution from these approaches? And then that goes to the justice piece too. It's not just about bringing economic development to a community through job creation. It's also about recognizing the values of a community. If there's a concern about health, safety, air pollution, and we have some technology that we might be able to improve, but we still need cement, we still need steel. And so those are the types of things that we're thinking of and these are demonstrations that have actually never been done before.
Cody Simms (00:48:58):
For some reason, in my mind I had that these technologies were further along the curve than direct air capture sounds like they're all in roughly similar amounts of readiness.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:49:09):
Yeah, I wish they were. Those three that I mentioned, for sure. When you look at the complexity of some of the industrial streams compared to say a natural gas combined cycle power plant, the natural gas effluent stream is just not as complicated. You're putting natural gas in the system. That's it. And so in terms of technological risk, the power sector is going to be lower from just the carbon capture perspective. But those industries, we're actually just trying to work on a lot of engagement with those industries. Depending on where you're at in the United States, some don't even know who the technology providers are, who they would even work with as a first step. So we're trying to do that matchmake. We actually have an application on our website called Matchmaker. We're trying to make these matches to technology providers and industrial decarbonization opportunities.
Cody Simms (00:49:58):
That sounds like an incredibly huge opportunity for someone to step in and help with. Great that you're doing it as well, but it seems like a needed marketplace, I guess, of solutions.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:50:08):
One thing I'll add to that is we talked about the voluntary carbon removal market in corporations, and you ask yourself, well, why? Why are they doing it? They're doing it because they don't have control over scope three emissions and they need durable carbon removal to meet their net-zero climate goals. And so they're counterbalancing those emissions that they can't control. And those scope three emissions tend to be exactly what we're talking about, cement, steel, paper, fuel. What we're also trying to do, and we're going to be launching this website pretty soon, we've only been working on it for a year and a half, but what we're trying to do is make more public our investments in what we call front end engineering design studies, which is the step before a pilot or a demo, and this is our bread and butter. It's really the gap that we're trying to fill. If you're a corporation and you're willing to pay $600 a ton for carbon removal, come on over here first and pay $100 a ton for the low carbon cement supply chain.
Cody Simms (00:51:13):
I'm going to assume a lot of the eventual volunteer buyers of these industrial categories will be buyers from within industry. It'll be essentially an inset, if you will, in their own scope three supply chain, but maybe not. Maybe broader marketplaces of outside voluntary buyers emerge as well, which would be great.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:51:33):
Mostly what I'm saying is can we fast track those dollars and put them directly into investing in the procurement of low carbon supply chains that they don't have access to today? So what we can do is at least, there's 91 cement plants in the United States. 91, okay, that have to report to EPA. And the question is take a corporation that is looking for a low carbon cement procurement opportunity that doesn't exist today, but if we show them who's leaning in, if we have say, 10 feeds in this sector, a company is applying for a feed because they've already lined up their carbon offtake for sequestration, maybe even have a class six permit in the queue. They've already identified a technology provider for the retrofit of their kiln. The corporation should look at who they're procuring cement from today and see if they're on that list. And if they're not, maybe they should switch.
Cody Simms (00:52:25):
I am hearing a big call for some form of advanced market commitment funding organization to emerge that focuses on industrial emissions.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:52:34):
That would be great.
Cody Simms (00:52:36):
Okay. I'm going to evolve this topic a little bit. So we look at 45Q, which is meant to provide federal dollars to help incentivize and lower the all in cost of carbon capture. It's $180 a ton for direct air capture. It's I believe, $85 a ton for these various point source applications we're talking about. Am I correct so far?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:53:00):
Correct.
Cody Simms (00:53:00):
Okay. And then there are these other pathways that are earlier in the technology readiness level that currently don't have federal tax credit support or 45Q support. Whether this, as we talked about bio oil a minute ago, bikers I guess is another one, ocean alkalinity, enhanced rock weathering. What do you see as needing to happen? Pick an example of these and explain how you see the federal tax credit market evolving around them.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:53:31):
I have good news, and I mentioned this earlier, we recognize the gap. We recognize the gap that there's no federal incentive available to make these economic, and part of it is because we can't quantify the carbon removal. So IRS is responsible for the tax credits. They need a lifecycle accounting. They need all of those checks and balances. We're leveraging our national labs. This is through something called technology commercialization fund. And it's just really an opportunity, right? Because at the end of the day, we want the nature-based approaches and the ocean-based approaches to be commercially viable. Commercially viable means that they need to have robust MRV tacked on. We are leveraging this program that we have as a vehicle in the federal government to invest in our national labs to develop the framework for MRV, and we're funding oceans, we're funding soils for agriculture and farming. We're funding forests. We're doing the entire portfolio of carbon removal.
(00:54:31):
So at the end of the day, I hope we can actually build in and think about, and this is something I'm excited about when I go back to Penn after my political appointment, is thinking about teaching students to develop new policies. They may not look like 45Q, but help us to have coupled with these projects, MRV number one, so that they're durable storage and we actually have the framework to be able to prove it. But number two, the engagement piece, the community benefits agreements. That should be coupled in too. Why should we be putting dollars out the door if we're not investing in people and taking care of people at the end of the day? I really think if we are investing across the entire portfolio to get to net-zero, the only way that it's going to stick and be sustainable is if taking care of people is in part of the framework. And so that's something that I'm excited about to bring the students in and be thinking about this.
Cody Simms (00:55:30):
I'm going to get theoretical here, but you look at what happened 20, 30, 40 years ago as the financial services industry matured in the US and then you look at the last 20, 30 years of the software technology industry maturing in the US and those industries in a large way, matured and left a lot of people behind. It was hard for lots of people to participate in those economies. The transition we're talking about here has the potential for lots of people of all sorts of different backgrounds, job occupation types, et cetera, to participate. And I think that's what I'm hearing you say is, how do we design policies that really lean in on the benefits that these new technologies can deliver to deliver jobs, to deliver training, to deliver transition resources for many, many people.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:56:17):
That's right. Exactly.
Cody Simms (00:56:19):
I love that sentiment. So thanks for sharing that. On another program topic, you all had a recent announcement. You have announced not only are you providing tax incentives and tax credits around director capture and carbon dioxide removal, the federal government is now stepping in and becoming a buyer of removed CO2.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:56:38):
Yeah, it's pretty exciting. So $35 million that we're looking at just a purchase program from the federal government, the first of its kind, we're just getting started on it and just hoping that it can serve as an example for more to come.
Cody Simms (00:56:54):
$35 million is a good chunk of money, but hopefully, it's a learning experiment that can help other parts of the federal government become a buyer of these technologies over time.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:57:02):
Well, and I think it's a learning experiment of if our government is doing this, and there's other governments that are leaning in too, you start to think about the broader scale. Some of the work we're doing too in the global south for instance, and you think about the opportunities there, the resources there. I always say carbon removal is really interesting in that there's something out there for everyone no matter where you live, whether it's improved forest management, the alkalinity work that you mentioned, direct air capture coupled to geothermal. There's exciting work happening in Kenya right now on this, and this is an opportunity I think, for other nations to play a role in providing a service with resources that they actually have because there's starting to be value as you get to nations making pledges around net-zero, there's starting to be a value. Some nations don't have the geologic storage and they don't have X, Y, and Z, and so if you are a region that has an approach to be able to quantify and do carbon removal in a durable way, it's valuable to somebody else who doesn't.
Cody Simms (00:58:11):
Shifting gears a little bit, the next topic I want to talk about is power consumption and power consumption for CDR and for DAC in particular. I've heard you say in multiple presentations, roughly the math is one megaton of CO2 is equal to about the size of a power plant, 250 to 500 megawatts of steady power. Is that the correct math roughly?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:58:34):
It's roughly, but I always have a caveat, so we should get into the footnotes if you'd like.
Cody Simms (00:58:39):
Get into the footnotes. Yes, please.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:58:42):
To me that's a little bit of a moral hazard just putting it out there almost like the same one of like, "Hey, you can put a direct air capture plant anywhere." And that is, is right now, the leading technologies that we have are based on getting the CO2 to 99.9% purity, so that's what that calculation is based on. The other piece is, it's also based on the fact that when you look at not just the power plant, but you look at the energy. So energy can be combined heat and power, and when you look at the energy and the emerging technologies that we're funding for demonstration today through the direct air capture hubs, they're both pretty thermal heavy. So the power and the electricity is really just for running fans, pumps, compressors. The big energy is about regenerating the material. Whether you're calcining carbonate in a kiln or you're regenerating a solid assortment that has the amines, you've got to regenerate the material so you use it over and over again because you want to really get rid of that CO2 and manage it downstream. And so it's that energy.
Cody Simms (00:59:48):
And that requires heat.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (00:59:50):
That requires heat or steam. That's the piece I think, that gets confused. And so then you think about something like geothermal, people will say, "Well, do we want to produce power or do we want to use the power to do direct air capture?" And there's this competition. It's not always like that. So some of the solid sorbents, the beauty of having that amine is that the quality, the wedge of heat in the energy pie between the two technologies today that are getting demonstration dollars, it's about the same, but it's the quality heat that's important. In other words, what temperature do you need to regenerate your solid sorbent? In some regions, it may be between 80 and 100 degrees C, what quality of heat do you need for your calciner? Might be anywhere from 800 to 1100 degrees C. So in that case, if you've got geothermal, yeah, you're going to have to choose maybe, are you going to use the working fluid to produce power or are you going to use it to regenerate your system for direct air capture?
(01:00:49):
But in the case of the solid absorbance, what's true of a geothermal system is when the working fluid, before it gets reinjected back into the earth, it goes through a unit in which it lowers the temperature. You don't want to inject something that's heated back into the earth, so you extract a lot of heat out to generate your power, but at the end of the day, your direct air capture could be that heat sink before you inject the working fluid back into the earth. So there's a way to optimize geothermal with direct air capture. So it's not an either/or. I think it's just misunderstood. The other thing I'll just mention is that there are emerging technologies today that don't rely on the regeneration being thermal, but only electrons.
Cody Simms (01:01:36):
Emerging direct air capture technologies?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:01:38):
Yes. And so it's like, well, that's interesting because maybe you are co-located in a region, and also by the way, you could turn it off and on because it's like a switch. We think of power like a switch. Where the thermal ramping up and ramping down cooling and heating, you don't necessarily want to turn it off and on and cycle that way.
Cody Simms (01:02:00):
There are also emerging technologies on the industrial heat side as well that are helping to provide industrial heat in a lower carbon manner than burning coal or burning natural gas.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:02:10):
Absolutely. And really interesting long duration energy storage that doesn't look like your typical battery. That could also be used to help [inaudible 01:02:20].
Cody Simms (01:02:20):
We've had a few of those on the show in the past as well. And so I'm hearing you say with direct air capture, because of this thermal requirement, it's another factor in why geography is important. You need to be somewhere relatively near sequestration or storage or have a transport solution figured out. You also don't only just need power, you also need a pretty significant amount of heat.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:02:42):
Yes. But the number that you quoted at the beginning is converting it all to the units of electricity, so you have to back up and just look at the energy and there's a component that's power, that's a component that's heat.
Cody Simms (01:02:55):
Okay. A topic we haven't hit on at all is non CO2 greenhouse gases, what I would call short duration, high warming potential gases, methane, nitrous oxide, et cetera. Can you share a little bit about the mandate of FECM as it relates to these other gases and some of what has you excited right now in the space to help reduce the future release of them, I think is probably the biggest challenge with these gases more so than removing them, the ones that are already up.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:03:27):
So in 2021, when we did our reorganization again before 2021, it was about investing in R&D to enhance the recovery of oil and gas from the subsurface. And so we're investing in technologies that minimize environmental and climate impacts of industry's production. And so that includes identifying, quantifying, truly stranded methane. You don't want to develop technology to just enable emissions. You want to develop technology where it's truly needed. And so looking at methane emissions in the field, that's truly stranded. And so we are investing in modular, in the field approaches that take methane and convert it to more useful products like hydrogen and ammonia. And this is now part of our program.
Cody Simms (01:04:19):
In the field, meaning in the oil field in particular, is that oil and gas field?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:04:23):
Yes. But it doesn't have to be. It could mean at a farm, and that's the broader context of these investments. It's you're developing a technology that's essentially a catalytic approach, is one way to think about it. You've got an area that has an increased concentration of methane because it was emitted from some process. It could be from some part of the oil and gas sector. Maybe it's in a case of ensuring safety and you have to have some amount of flaring, for instance, or venting. It could be coupled to that after you've already done all the work of minimizing that release. But you could imagine too, in an agricultural field, you could imagine what if we have permafrost release of methane that's naturally occurring and we've got a technology that we can go and use in the field.
Cody Simms (01:05:14):
I think the last question I have for you is, boy, a lot has happened in the last two years. Is this a special moment in time or do you expect this amount of progress to continue for the foreseeable future?
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:05:28):
It better not be a special moment in time or we're not going to get there in time. We need to do this in double and triple. Just in terms of durable carbon removal, durable. So I'm not talking about the forests that exist today, even the additional, we're at the order of thousands of tons globally, and we know even in the responsible way to think about how much carbon removal will need from bottom up, not assuming some overshoot and top down big number, but bottom up responsible. What are the sectors that are truly hard to decarbonize? What do they add up to? We're still going to need to get to gigatons, and so if we're at thousands and we've got to go through millions, that's six more zeros in 27 years now, and so we've never scaled up anything like this. We have started and we need to keep it going.
Cody Simms (01:06:17):
Dr. Wilcox, thank you so much for your time today. I learned a ton. I know we've only scratched the surface of these topics. It's amazing the amount of work that you and your colleagues are doing and appreciate you taking your time to come on here and share some of that with us.
Dr. Jen Wilcox (01:06:32):
Thank you so much for having me.
Jason Jacobs (01:06:33):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (01:06:37):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (01:06:47):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com and if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at mcjpod.
Yin Lu (01:07:00):
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ venture funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Jason Jacobs (01:07:09):
Thanks, and see you next episode.