Cracking the Carbon Capture Challenge with Mantel

Carbon

Dec 21

Cameron Halliday is the CEO and Co-founder of Mantel.

Mantel is developing a point source carbon capture solution, which means they're developing technology that can sit next to industrial equipment and capture its emissions. Mantel's key innovation lies in their utilization of a high-temperature liquid-phase material for carbon capture, enabling operation at temperatures as high as 600 degrees Celsius. Allegedly, this material can cycle between capture and release without experiencing deterioration or decay.

Point source carbon capture is somewhat controversial, as detractors argue that it extends the life of high-emissions processes. Promoters argue that we need all solutions on the table to reduce emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. Cameron and Cody discuss this at the start of the episode, before diving into his technology and go-to-market solution. He articulates a unique approach to go-to-market, wherein he's determined a way to minimize the integration dependency that his industrial customers would have to take on to get a pilot up and running with Mantel. Cameron maintains a close affiliation with MIT, having earned both his PhD and MBA there. In 2022, Mantel secured a seed round of funding, led by The Engine—a venture fund founded by MIT with a focus on tough tech.

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Episode recorded on Nov 13, 2023 (Published on Dec 21, 2023)

In this episode, we cover:

[02:06]: An explanation of point source capture
[04:12]: Controversy around its use
[09:20]: An overview of Mantel, their mission, and their tech
[12:37]: Cost impact for companies, early adopters, and motivations
[16:47]: Introduction to amine technology
[18:18]: General overview of carbon capture concepts
[21:16]: Mantle's molten salts technology
[25:42]: Their "crawl, walk, run" approach to commercializing
[31:17]: Potential to apply Mantel's tech to biogenic sources of carbon
[33:05]: Physical configuration of Mantle's systems which connect to smokestacks
[34:20]: Cameron's background and his dual PhD/MBA from MIT
[39:46]: Mantle's founding team and investors like The Engine
[41:39]: Process of identifying and mitigating risks for Mantle's technology
[43:30]: Customizing Mantle's system for different industrial use cases
[46:05]: Parting words on the urgency of deploying point source capture

Cody Simms (00:00):
On today's episode of the My Climate Journey startup series, our guest is Cameron Halliday, CEO and Co-founder of Mantel. Mantel is developing a point source carbon capture solution, which means they're developing technology that can sit next to industrial equipment and capture the emissions coming off of it. Their innovation is that they're harnessing a high temperature liquid phase material for carbon capture, which allows them to operate at temperatures of 600 degrees Celsius, and purportedly cycle between capture and release without deterioration or decay.
(00:38):
Point source carbon capture has some controversy to it as detractors argue that it extends the life of high emissions processes. Promoters argue that we need all solutions on the table to reduce emissions in hard to abate sectors. Cameron and I talk a bit about this at the start of the episode, and then we dive into his technology and go-to-market solution. He articulates a unique approach to go-to-market, wherein he's determined a way to minimize the integration dependency that his industrial customers would have to take on in order to get a pilot up and running with Mantel. Cameron has a tight affiliation with MIT, having obtained his PhD and MBA there. And Mantel raised a seed round in 2022, led by The Engine, a venture fund founded by MIT to focus on tough tech. But before we dive in, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (01:38):
And I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (01:39):
And I'm Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:45):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (01:50):
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. Cameron, welcome to the show.
Cameron Halliday (02:05):
Thanks for having me, Cody.
Cody Simms (02:06):
I am so excited to have this conversation. As I was sharing with you a little bit before I hit the old record button here, we've done many conversations on this podcast about carbon capture, about direct air capture, about forms of nature-based carbon removal, but the topic that we really actually haven't hit on that much is point source capture, which rather than me try to explain it, maybe let's have you explain what is point source capture.
Cameron Halliday (02:36):
Point source capture was sort of the original here. The carbon capture ecosystem began a very long time ago. Originally we were capturing CO2 from natural gas coming out of a well to try and make pure natural gas that can be burned. And then in the seventies and eighties it became a technology for decarbonizing industry. It had a lot of ups and downs and in the recent history that it sort of expanded to other elements of trying to remove CO2's, particularly from the atmosphere via direct air capture and other forms of carbon removal. But point source was the vision for how you apply carbon capture to heavy industrial emitters. Originally this was coal and gas fired power plants, and now it's heavy industrial sectors like petrochemical, cement, steel, hydrogen, pulp and paper, all these things.
Cody Simms (03:23):
So it's looking for acute sources of emissions that are concentrated, essentially trying to build a way to not ever let those emissions come out into the atmosphere without requiring a ton of change in terms of the industrial process that is generating the emissions in the first place. Is that an accurate way of describing point source capture?
Cameron Halliday (03:46):
Exactly. The allure here, the promise, is that it's an opportunity to leverage existing infrastructure and decarbonize existing infrastructure without having to tear it up and replace it. You're building off of the world's industry. This represents trillions of dollars of assets that have been deployed. Our whole economy is built around this, and so it's trying to find a way to cost effectively decarbonize as I said, without having to tear it up and start again.
Cody Simms (04:12):
The detractors I guess would say, "Hey, this technology is extending the life of emmitive things that are out there. It's making it to where you're not having to change the way we as a society make goods and products, whether it's cement, whether it's steel, whether it's paper as you said, or even fossil fuels potentially." The proponents would say, maybe more pragmatists you could also call them, would say, "Hey, the reality of it is we don't have scaled technologies to do some of these things in other ways yet, and so in the meantime, the world needs paper, it needs steel, it needs cement, and so this is a solution that you could plug in. The question is, what's the time horizon of building the decarbonized version of cement relative to the time horizon of point source capture for... I'm using cement as an example of point source capture for cements being ready to scale." That's where I sit in terms of my understanding of the controversy or the topic here. Is that the correct way to think about it?
Cameron Halliday (05:14):
Yeah, that's a good framing and that is a big part of discussion. But I think it's also important to recognize what is the goal here? The goal is net-zero emissions by 2050 is a nice way of wrapping it up. You can form that in different ways, but that's a sensible target with a nice time horizon and is sort of quantifiable and I would argue that if you applied carbon capture to all these systems, that's achieving the goal. If you can capture 95% plus of these emissions and then supplement that with some carbon removal, you've achieved net-zero, you can do it in a timely manner, and I would suggest there's no reason to try and replace these emitters if they can continue burning fossil fuels if they are cleaned up. That is sort of the promise.
(05:52):
The challenge has always been that that's very hard to do and it's very hard to do in a cost-effective way. And so really for us, the way I think about this is the goal is to try and do this at the lowest possible cost. There are lots of pathways to getting to net-zero and we are trying to elucidate the lowest cost path and carbon capture has a pretty critical role to play, especially in different industries but potentially across a lot of different industries is decarbonizing all of these assets.
Cody Simms (06:19):
So given that framing, it's interesting because you were saying this could apply not just to industrial processes that may emit, but also frankly to straighten up continuation of using fossil fuels. From when I hear people pushing back on point source capture, that's the point they're making, which is that the IPCC reports, a bunch of science, is saying right now that we need to basically move off of fossil fuels as fast as possible and point source capture potentially is the solution that helps the industry not do that, continues to empower oil and gas companies, et cetera to do business as normal.
(06:57):
Is there any argument to be made that point source should be applied to industrial process that needs heat, that has a chemical reaction, that needs to release emissions, but that it shouldn't be used to extend fossil fuel exploration and combustion?
Cameron Halliday (07:13):
This is sort of where the controversy comes in and this is why this is a super interesting topic to be debating. But if the goal is net-zero emissions and you can capture those emissions and essentially sequester the CO2, then you could argue that there's not a big problem with continuing to burn natural gas for some of these processes, specifically processes where it is going to be really hard to decarbonize in any other way. There's good examples where a lot of these things could be electrified, in theory. The question is it cost-effective and there are going to be a lot of situations where you might be increasing the cost of what you're producing by orders of magnitude if you try and electrify that versus adding carbon capture where you might be increasing the cost by say 30, 40, 50%.
(07:56):
That is a huge saving and the end result can be the same. The end result can be a low carbon or even a zero carbon product. That's what's interesting and makes this a little controversial because a lot of people have narrowed in on the goal being more narrow than net-zero, the goal being eliminate fossil fuels, but I would actually say the goal is net-zero and if you narrow in on one pathway, you're closing a door that could be very interesting, especially for certain industries.
Cody Simms (08:26):
From where I sit, the goal is get to net-zero, get the world to a place where we're not creating more emissions than we're removing, or that are going away naturally and do so in a way that doesn't create economic pain and injustice for people around the world too. That's a balance. There's injustice to living next to a coal plant for example, but there's also injustice to energy poverty and not having the power you need, especially in emerging and developing markets that need to industrialize rapidly in order to increase quality of life. And boy, it's a complicated topic.
Cameron Halliday (09:02):
It's a really complicated topic, and that is why this is such a critical topic to be discussing and this comes to your other point, Cody, which is the time horizon piece of this. It's great to be discussing the pros and cons of all these options, but we really need to be deploying all of them to have any chance of getting close to what we are trying to do.
Cody Simms (09:20):
Not that this is more tactical at all, but let's move into the more narrow and specific, which is what is Mantel? What specifically are you building and what problems are you going after?
Cameron Halliday (09:29):
Carbon capture as a solution to decarbonization. It's been around for a very long time. And piggybacks off a lot of what was done in the seventies and eighties to reduce acid gas emissions, which was a prior environmental disaster, a global problem.
Cody Simms (09:44):
Is that acid rain? Same thing?
Cameron Halliday (09:46):
Acid rain, yeah. I like to think of this as the genesis of carbon capture. This is where it began, is acid rain was a big problem and industry was emitting all of these nasty gases into the environment causing an environmental problem and people started to wake up to that idea and they added scrubbers. They added systems to remove those emissions and at first, industry complained a lot because the cost was high and then people innovated and now those scrubbers are deployed across every major emitter in the world and we no longer really think about acid rain.
Cody Simms (10:18):
In most cases, these are legally required technologies that in order to even get a permit to operate, you have to have these in place, in general. Is that accurate?
Cameron Halliday (10:28):
The public was upset with the damage, the environmental damage and policy stepped in to internalize that negative externality and force people to reduce these emissions and they did. And they complained and then people found a way to reduce the cost and now there's not much complaining. Everyone accepts that this was a good thing to do, and I personally see a huge number of analogies there with the carbon capture, that we're doing the exact same thing now, but the gas is CO2 instead of SO2 and MO2. And the problem is bigger and I would say messier. It is similar. It's the same emitters. It's the same parties with the same sort of opinions and now we're at the junction where people are trying to innovate to drive down the cost and make this palatable for industry and that is what Mantel is about.
Cody Simms (11:11):
Is point source capture then, that's what this is. This is point source capture... These scrubbers that you would put on smokestacks or emissions, I guess if I understand it. Is it also a pure cost center for these industries the way you describe the acid gas scrubbers or is there also some way that they can use these technologies in a way that they can either lower cost of operations or can gain efficiencies?
Cameron Halliday (11:38):
Often this is a cost. There is a lot of emphasis and work to try and make this a value creating activity. You are trying to prevent a mess. So the world is currently making a mess and you are trying to prevent that mess. That is an added cost. That is an added step the industry wouldn't do otherwise. They're not doing otherwise, and so it does increase the cost. That is the problem with carbon capture, that is sort of number one, is this is almost always going to be a cost adder and so there needs to be some real incentive for industry to do it and often policy plays a key role in that, but increasingly there are ways to get around it in other ways.
(12:15):
So one example is these customers or these steel companies can pass that cost on and sell green steel at a premium. If you're more consumer facing, that becomes even easier. The other side of this is potentially you can use this CO2, and if you can make use of this CO2 that can help offset some of the cost. But it's very hard to make this a pure value creation exercise, otherwise they would've done it already.
Cody Simms (12:37):
On the one hand I'm hearing you say these companies that utilize point source capture, it is going to make their process more expensive to them... Maybe less expensive to the world if you factor in the externalities here... But more expensive to them as companies and potentially depending on the industry or the product, there are some buyers of low carbon or low emissions versions of their products that may be willing to pay a premium there, but when you're talking just their bread and butter standard product, it's probably making their margins lower or their overall cost of doing business greater.
(13:13):
There is a chance that they're also capturing CO2. That is something they can sell if they have a buyer and want to build a supply chain business around CO2, if they maybe already have a supply chain business around other gases that they capture for example. If that's the case and I'm understanding correctly, who are the early movers here and what's motivating them to do it?
Cameron Halliday (13:34):
This has been going on a long time. People have been trying to do carbon capture for decades and was originally a vision for how you clean up coal plants. And there are some pretty large demonstrations on coal plants like full scale gigawatt size coal plants and they by and large work. They've definitely had some typical challenges you see with first of a kind deployments, but the tech works. It is just proven very, very expensive. These are sort of classical like mega projects. You're deploying hundreds of millions of dollars on a project. It's a long project, it's expensive. There's lots of contingencies and there's lots of cost overruns.
Cody Simms (14:09):
When you hear people say "clean coal," is this what they're talking to coal that has these carbon capture devices installed in them?
Cameron Halliday (14:17):
Yes. Often. There's many different variants of how this technology can be deployed and that's a term that's used to summarize some of them. The other end of this spectrum is there are a bunch of places where people are emitting relatively pure streams of CO2 into the atmosphere today and that's a really low hanging fruit where you can just stop doing that and then go and use the CO2, store the CO2, whether it's for sequestration or utilization, you don't necessarily need the separation step, which is often the most expensive part of the process and so good examples here are natural gas processing. People have been doing this for a very long time. Ethanol production is something that's emerged. It's grown a lot recently because there is a lot of it. Those are sort of the other end of this. You can start doing this at very low costs and there's a lot of interest in going after that resource.
Cody Simms (15:07):
For the most part then do you expect this market will be largely adopted early in policy friendly environments for these types of technologies, which I presume would maybe start with Europe, but also I guess there's 45Q in the United States as well that is also helping to support the economics parity for emitters to want to look at this? Am I making the right mental leap here?
Cameron Halliday (15:33):
Yes. We're trying to do this at lowest possible cost. And honestly the costs can be quite low. The dollars per ton of CO 2 avoided is often one of the cheapest ways to decarbonize most of these industries. It is normally framed as a cost and that is challenging. That's a mental challenge for folks. It is the clearest way of explaining it. In Europe there are policy schemes, like cap and trade schemes, that motivate this. There are sort of mechanisms to try and incentivize industries to do this. You're right. In the US it's more of a carrot than a stick. 45Q is almost a production tax credit for a CO2 captured and storage you get paid by the federal government for doing so.
Cody Simms (16:11):
Point source being I think $85 a ton for point source.
Cameron Halliday (16:14):
So for point source it's $85 a ton. For a CO2 that's sequestered it's $60 a ton, if you're utilizing that CO2. And then there are other jurisdictions, and there's a world here where this takes the form of where we went with acid rain, which is these industries are told they have to decarbonize, it is a requirement otherwise they lose their social license to operate and that is something that is very real if we are serious about our 2050 net-zero targets.
Cody Simms (16:38):
We're still probably ways away from a technology readiness level to mandate technologies or are there technologies already at scale that are doing this?
Cameron Halliday (16:47):
I would argue the amine technology could be deployed today and could be used to decarbonize most of the world's emissions. That is a technically viable thing to do. It is not very attractive.
Cody Simms (16:57):
You said amines, is that what you said?
Cameron Halliday (16:59):
Amines. Yeah-
Cody Simms (17:00):
Which is basically liquid forms of carbon capture if I understand correctly.
Cameron Halliday (17:06):
Yeah, so amines represent a sort of class of chemistry that is the state-of-the-art carbon capture technology today. Amines were developed for carbon capture in the 1930s and have, I would say, incrementally improved over the past nearly a hundred years, but remains sort of the state-of-the-art way for decarbonizing or capturing CO2 from point sources.
Cody Simms (17:27):
There are other forms. There's solid state forms of carbon capture that are starting to emerge today in a lot of the direct air capture field as I understand it correctly, different types of absorbents that are being used that are not liquid based. And those are sort of your two primary, very high level technologies of choice for direct air capture today.
Cameron Halliday (17:47):
Yes. So the way we sort of think about this and this frames Mantel a little bit is we think about this as a two by two matrix. So you have liquid phase absorbance and solid phase add adsorbance ad with a D, and then you have low temperature processes and you have high temperature processes. And so the amine technology is a liquid phase, low temperature absorbent, sometimes called a solvent, that just binds to the CO two.
Cody Simms (18:11):
So it's operating at room temperature-ish.
Cameron Halliday (18:14):
Yeah. Room temperature to less than a hundred degrees Celsius. I think, maybe Cody, it'll be helpful just to frame... All of carbon capture, most of it's kind of the same. You have a material, it's like binding to CO2 in one environment, the capture step. And then in another environment you're driving the regeneration or the desorption step and what you're doing in the desorption is you're trying to break the chemical bonds and get the CO2 back off and that's what makes this so energy intensive.
(18:40):
But the material can be many different things. The gas is technically an acid gas and it reacts with basically any base. Base plus acid form salt and you can reverse that reaction by putting energy in. That's what almost all of these are doing. The amine technology was the sort of initial approach that industry took to do this. Back in the thirties and forties, lots of other chemistries were explored and the amines were selected as the best. They came with a lot of challenges, but they were selected as the best. And then fast forwards now that there's a lot more interest in doing this at the billions of tons of CO2 a year kind of scale, obviously lots of people have thought about how to improve.
(19:21):
And one of the ways to improve, especially when you talk about direct air capture is to start using solid base chemistry. One of the challenges that the liquids face and the amines are particularly susceptible to this is they tend to vaporize. You tend to lose some of that liquid to the gas phase and when you're doing direct air capture you can lose quite a lot of that. In fact, you can lose a crazy amount of the amine. And so solid structures are a good way of preventing that. But they introduce a whole bunch of other challenges and issues and so there's a list of pros and cons for all of these approaches.
Cody Simms (19:49):
So you all, at Mantel, are on the liquid side, but you're doing it at high temperature, which makes sense when you're talking about sitting on a big smokestack. If I understand correctly.
Cameron Halliday (20:00):
The high temperature piece here is what's a little counterintuitive and is part of the novelty. It's not new to us. The interest in high temperature carbon capture goes back to the eighties. People were trying to do this in a concept or a technology called calcium looping where you're taking calcium oxide as the base, as the material that binds to the CO2, forming calcium carbonate and then you do what's called a temperature swing and you increase the temperature to drive that CO2 off and then you cycle between those two environments.
(20:28):
That was originally a high temperature carbon capture concept. It's been taken now to do a lot of other things, including direct air capture and less point source capture but more mobile capture and it had a bunch of problems when it was being used for a point source. And we were deep in that set of problems trying to solve them and when I say we, this was academic us really bought into the idea that carbon capture was a great path to decarbonizing heavy industry. High temperature carbon capture, held some promise and we were trying to figure out how to solve some of these challenges. And the solution we came up with was these liquid phase materials that really solved a key challenge and made it possible to do this very efficiently and therefore very cheaply.
Cody Simms (21:11):
The specific technology you're using is a molten salt of some sort?
Cameron Halliday (21:16):
Yeah. So molten salts are high temperature liquids. We developed a molten boric chemistry and the molten borates are unique because they're the only molten salts that are bases, and bases react with acid gases to form salts. The language is a little confusing. The molten borates capture the CO2 and they do that very effectively. That is Mantel's core innovation and core technology is the ability to do that very efficiently.
Yin Lu (21:39):
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.
(22:06):
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 (22:40):
When I think of molten salt in the energy context, I typically think of long duration energy storage because it has been one of the early solutions for trying to figure out how to store residual power from solar and wind for example. I'm curious if anything in that space is what inspired you to start working with these materials at all.
Cameron Halliday (23:00):
I wouldn't say it was the inspiration, but we're definitely piggybacking off a lot of the learning and challenges that those industries face. So molten salts have been, as a class of material, have mostly been used for concentrated solar and there's a good amount of experience in the nuclear industry. It's not widely used commercially for nuclear, but a lot of research and development has gone into the material handling and challenges around using molten salts.
(23:22):
We leverage that learning the molten salts are challenging materials to work with and that is the core of what we are trying to do as a company is show that these materials can be used at scale in industry for this.
Cody Simms (23:34):
And what do they provide to you that other point source capture solutions today maybe aren't able to unlock?
Cameron Halliday (23:41):
This goes back to the basis of what we're trying to do, which is absorption, capturing the CO2 and desorption regenerates that CO2. The insight here is that desorption is very energy intensive. You have to break those bonds to get the CO2 out. The technical leap is recognizing that that reaction is reversible, and so absorption produces just as much heat as desorption consumes. When you do this process at low temperatures, so at ambient conditions, you're consuming loss of heat normally in the form of steam to drive the desorption. That's useful energy. And then you are producing a bunch of waste energy on absorption because you're generating heat at 30 degrees Celsius.
(24:23):
All of that heat is low grade heat and it gets wasted or lost from the system as waste heat. The idea behind high temperature carbon capture is to go and do the same thing at high temperatures. So you still require the high grade heat to drive desorption, but now you get a lot of that or all of that heat back on absorption, and now you have a source of heat that you can use to essentially offset the heat required to drive the desorption process and drive the energy penalty or the energy losses to nearly zero. And that's the theory we're trying to exploit.
Cody Simms (24:55):
And are you harnessing the heat from the industrial process that you're attached to in the first place in some way?
Cameron Halliday (25:01):
Yeah. So there are different pathways for how we integrate into different existing emitters. A lot of our focus initially is to try and be as unintrusive as possible to the existing sites. When we talk with operators and owners of assets, they have no intention of letting us touch their assets. They're running 24-7 and most of these businesses are pretty low margin and have no bandwidth to shut down for weeks or even hours. There is a strong effort to keep the asset online, so our focus is actually just to take the slipstream from the flue gas, run it through our capture system and then put it back into the stack and then we build a separate sort of dedicated desorption system to drive the desorption.
Cody Simms (25:42):
You're needing then in that case to find your own source of energy and generate the heat necessary to drive the process.
Cameron Halliday (25:48):
We're taking a bit of a crawl, walk, run approach. And so crawl is we build a new system that captures its own CO2. An easy system for us to build initially is just a natural gas fired boiler. So our demonstration projects and a lot of our first projects are essentially gas fired boilers that capture their own emissions and so now you have a green steam or a clean steam for a site to use, but you've essentially built a new boiler. That is the technically easiest system for us to go and deploy and show that the tech works at an industrially relevant scale, and it's actually a really attractive thing to do If there's a demand for new boilers. Our boilers can be nearly as efficient as boilers without carbon capture, which is a slightly crazy claim, but it's something we're increasingly able to back up. That's crawl.
(26:34):
The walk is the recognition that most sites don't necessarily need new boilers or the assets they're trying to decarbonize are much harder to decarbonize than boilers. They're lime kilns, they're blast furnaces, they're cat crackers, they're really hard to decarbonize assets, and so walk for us is let's pair our boiler with an existing emitter so the boilers that we're building have the capacity to capture much more than just their own emission source. And so we pair it with some existing asset where we have very little impact on the existing asset, but we're normally replacing a boiler that's already on site. Typically, we put that boiler on standby and we put our boiler in that captures its own emissions as well as the emissions from the nearby emitter.
Cody Simms (27:15):
Before you get to run, let me make sure I can spit this back and see if I've understood it. So for crawl. You have this point source system but it needs heat to operate and so in order to not be intrusive to the industrial project that you are trying to attach to, you build your own natural gas-based heat source, you put your capture technology on top of it, and you're able to generate steam in, essentially a zero emissions factor using natural gas to drive it, which has basically created a carbon-neutral or zero carbon steam boiler system, and that allows you to operate your system closed loop by itself off on the side in some storage container sized system, somewhere in that ballpark.
(28:01):
And then your ability to capture carbon is much greater than what your own closed loop system can generate because obviously you're building it for someone else to use, so then you can pipe their emissions into your system, capture the carbon off of it. If they want to tap into the steam heat that you're generating, fantastic. They can plug into that and utilize that heat for their own industrial process but they don't have to. Am I following correctly?
Cameron Halliday (28:26):
Yeah, Cody, that's exactly right. I'll give one slight redirect. When you're trying to capture millions of tons a year, these things get pretty big and so our demonstrations look like shipping containers and I like to call the demonstration we're building like a double-decker bus size system when we get to trying to decarbonize a full site, these assets are 10-story tall systems. They're big systems.
Cody Simms (28:47):
All right, so that's crawl and walk. And so run, you're building these 10 story tall systems and what else are you able to do at that point?
Cameron Halliday (28:54):
There are lots of ways in which we can integrate into existing assets and be much more creative with how we avoid the need to burn new fuel. The challenge with walk is you're burning new fuel to do this. Run is find ways to avoid that and that looks very different. It's very site dependent and it becomes a real engineering exercise for every site. The nice thing about walk is we can copy paste and it looks very similar across sites.
Cody Simms (29:17):
Do you see yourself being an industrial heat provider potentially or is the reality you're more likely to be a consumer of their heat source?
Cameron Halliday (29:25):
This comes to business model, and is a really interesting topic in this space because I would suggest no one's really figured out exactly how they want to engage and that's not just the startups in this space, that's also the customers. But ultimately we see ourselves as a technology provider and we want to operate in a way that is consistent with industry today, which is to say today they buy boilers and they operate them themselves. We want to be able to sell capture systems and have our customers operate them themselves. These systems look quite similar to these systems they're operating today, and so we are more of a technology provider than like a we build don't operate and provide carbon capture as a service, which is an alternative business model.
Cody Simms (30:04):
You've sort of been required to build your own zero emissions boilers today in order to do the thing you want to do, which is carbon capture. Whether in the future you are providing heat as a service sort of remains to be seen, but isn't the core reason that the company exists is what I'm hearing you say.
Cameron Halliday (30:22):
Exactly, Cody. Our technology can be useful for a lot of different industries and we want to enable all of them.
Cody Simms (30:27):
Super interesting and I can imagine a world where you're partnering with some of these other startups that are developing industrial heat. We've had them on the show companies like Rondo or Antora, et cetera. I could also see a world where they might be competition of yours in some totally different view as you continue to grow and scale and figure out other business lines that you could verticalize into, I suppose.
Cameron Halliday (30:47):
It's been part technical part business, but we have been focused on these gas fired boilers just as the easiest way to get our technology to scale, but the ultimate prize here is to decarbonize the stuff that has really hard alternatives. Steel and cement are great examples. A lot of the chemical industry are good examples. And the other, talking to the big vision about how we get to truly net-zero because remember when we do carbon capture we're typically not capturing a hundred percent, we're capturing 90, 95, 98%. It's very hard to get much higher than that.
(31:17):
We've always been really excited about applying our technology to biogenic sources of carbon, specifically biogenic sources of carbon that are already being used. Places we're already burning lots of biomass and you compare point source capture with biogenic sources of carbon as a way of doing carbon removal, and that's a really compelling story for cases especially where you're already burning the biomass. So pulp and paper today, waste to energy, bioenergy, where you're not trying to regrow biomass but you're using existing sources of sustainably sourced biomass.
Cody Simms (31:48):
Why would that be the key focus? I guess because that's using a fuel source that as you said is essentially regenerative fuel source and is thus likely an industry practice that will continue on even as fossil fuel exploration starts to trend down towards zero over the coming decades. Is that the reason why?
Cameron Halliday (32:08):
The idea behind bioenergy and carbon capture is... So just looking at bioenergy today where the biomass pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, when that biomass is combusted, the CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. And you introduce a loosely net-zero impact. There's a lot of indirect emissions and challenges with that, so there is some positive emissions, but it's typically less than burning coal if it's done well, if it's done appropriately and sustainably.
(32:33):
And so one way to do carbon removal from the atmosphere is to capture those emissions as they come out the stack. And so the biomass is capturing the CO2 in the field, and then when it's combusted we capture it and put it underground and you've achieved net negative emissions and the world actually burns quite a lot of biomass today and that is a path to doing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon removal if not billions of tons of carbon removal and that can really help remove emissions or provide removals for sources of emissions that are truly impossible to abate.
Cody Simms (33:05):
Cameron, we talked about the form factor today of these capture devices being double-decker bus sized and getting to 10-story building sized. What does it look like coming off of the existing factory? Are you basically putting hats on smokestacks or what is the actual use case of redirecting the emissions look like?
Cameron Halliday (33:26):
If we think of our walk example where we're building a new boiler and our boiler looks pretty much the same as a boiler would for the same steam outputs, and so our systems look really similar to the systems that are already on the site.
Cody Simms (33:39):
In the future, you're basically creating some kind of capture device in the line of emissions coming out of the facility?
Cameron Halliday (33:47):
So this looks like a scrubber. The system that sits in the existing emission source is a scrubber. It's a big column. Physically what's happening is you're flowing a liquid down. Think shower head spraying liquid and gas flowing up through and our columns are 10-15 feet tall and their width depends on how much CO2 you're trying to process, but they pull out all of the CO2 they come into contact with. There's very limited impact. It looks like another scrubber. So these emitters often already have the socks and no scrubbers and this is a third step to remove the last remaining impurity that is a concern and that's CO2.
Cody Simms (34:20):
Super helpful. We haven't talked about you and your background. You've got an amazing background. You've got both a PhD and an MBA from MIT, if I understand correctly. And you've recently been a Breakthrough Energy fellow. How in the world did you decide of all the things you could potentially work on, given those backgrounds, how did you decide to focus on this problem?
Cameron Halliday (34:43):
The focus on this problem came way before all of those things. I was a chemical engineering undergrad in the UK and I came to MIT to work under Professor Alan Hatton with the goal of working on carbon capture. From that point as an undergrad, I was like, this feels like it can have a critical role to play in solving one of the world's biggest problems for this century and that is the climate challenge. And I was really bought into like let's figure out how to do this better. I went and worked under Alan and I worked on a completely unrelated topic for six months. And then he said, "You should come back and do a PhD." And I said, "I have two conditions. First condition is I want to do this dual PhD/MBA program," which is a super interesting program that I have really enjoyed. It's called the PhD/CEP. It's unique to MIT and is a really great blend of two very different worldviews that come to a front in a startup.
(35:35):
And so that was condition one and the second condition was I want to work on carbon capture. And so those two things happened. I came back. And I worked on a couple different projects in the early days and then about six months in, we discovered these materials and it was truly like a scientific discovery. We were working on these high temperature solid phase materials for carbon capture, trying to find ways to solve the degradation problem that they face. And we stumbled across a chemistry that was liquid. And it took us about three months to realize it was liquid, but we eventually realized it was a liquid, and that was why it wasn't degrading in the same way. And that was the technical unlock, the first domino in the sequence that took us to where we are now.
Cody Simms (36:18):
Forgive my very obtuse question, but how do you not know that something is a liquid versus a solid when you're working with it?
Cameron Halliday (36:26):
This is very classic of academia. You're trying to figure out what's going on and you think what's going on, but it's kind of hard to prove what's going on. At 600 degrees C in the environments in which these things are operating, you have no visual of what's going on. And so it took us some time, and I remember a moment using a piece of equipment that was very hard to get time on and so it was like 2:00 AM on a Saturday-
Cody Simms (36:48):
Oh, this is some special thing in the basement of a super secret building kind of thing. Yes?
Cameron Halliday (36:53):
That kind of thing. Exactly.
Cody Simms (36:55):
Okay. Got it.
Cameron Halliday (36:56):
And I had reserved two hours from 1:00 AM to 3:00 AM to go and prove, and I knew intuitively this was a liquid, but in academia that's not enough. You need to prove it factually. And so this piece of equipment proves that. It's called like a high temperature X-ray diffraction. You can identify the phase of different materials, the crystalline structure. And we showed that this was a borate and that at a high temperature it melted and then as it absorbed CO2, it remained a liquid. And that was the key unlock where we were able to show that this started to behave much more like a liquid liquid system rather than the solid systems we were closest to. We were very close to all these solid phase chemistries where you could see the calcium oxide reacts to form a calcium carbonate.
(37:38):
You could see that phase chain or that two phases in the X-ray diffraction, and then we proved that under these conditions we have this liquid and now all of it starts to make sense. This all starts to look actually quite like the amine technology and our designs for the system look similar to the amine technology. There are scrubbers, there are liquid pumps, there are liquid liquid heat exchangers, and there are storage tanks and transfer piping and it looks much more normal than some of the high temperature solid phase designs that we had to stretch to make this concept work.
Cody Simms (38:10):
And it seems like as part of your studies in this dual PhD/MBA program, you were able to have incredible internships in industry. You worked at ABB, you worked at Shell, you worked at Emirates Global Aluminum, worked at BCG, I presume all of these were helping you just get smarter on the various use cases that you may be wanting to help these large companies solve.
Cameron Halliday (38:34):
When Alan suggested I come and do a PhD, one of the reasons I wanted to do the MBA as well is I was very determined that what I worked on and what I do for my career has an impact in the real world in industry. And so I took every opportunity I could to try and get into industry, learn everything I could and observe and absorb all of that information. And that took the form of lots of different programs. The Practice School is where I got to spend time at Shell and EGA. I worked a little bit in oil and gas doing process safety for ABB, and then I did an internship at BCG during the MBA and then came back off of that to meet my co-founders and spin Mantel out as a company.
Cody Simms (39:13):
Amazing. Who did you founded it with? Who are your co-founders?
Cameron Halliday (39:16):
So Danielle and Sean have been amazing partners in this. From a sort of personal journey like this was my PhD work and as a PhD you get very stuck into all of the technical problems. And meeting Danielle and Sean really helped me step back from that and come back to the big vision and perspective that I'm sharing with you now around how this can be used as a low cost path to decarbonizing the world. And they have been instrumental in helping get this technology out of academia and towards a scaled deployment in industry. And that's where we're going and we're going quickly.
Cody Simms (39:46):
And you raised a seed round last year that was led by The Engine, which is MIT's early stage deep tech fund. Explain a little bit about that process. You also had in that round New Climate Ventures. It was Eric Rubenstein at New Climate Ventures who introduced us when I told him I was looking to do more on point source capture and he said, well then you have to talk to Cameron. So thank you Eric, if you're listening. But explain a little bit more about going from being in academia to saying, hey, we're going to go try to build a venture scale business. And what the process was like of raising that first round with the engine as you were making that transition.
Cameron Halliday (40:23):
I think one of the first things I should say is, as a PhD student as an MBA, this was never my intention. I actually ended my PhD looking at this saying, this looks great on paper, you're going to need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prove it, and no one's ever going to do that. And that was where I left it because I didn't have an insight into this ecosystem. And then the MBA and meeting the co-founders and then meeting the people at The Engine and specifically, other founders who were a year, 2, 3, 4 years ahead and seeing the amazing technologies they're working on, the amazing challenges they're facing, and the commitments they have to going out and doing it was really inspiring for me and made me appreciate that actually we're sitting on something great here and we should really go and prove that it works.
(41:07):
That was what got me excited again. We met folks at The Engine very early on and built trust and that relationship over time, getting towards the seed round. We did some early stage competitions and that's how we met the folks at New Climate Ventures. And then the seed round slowly came together as we graduated and spun out of MIT.
Cody Simms (41:26):
And what gave you the confidence to say, hey, yes, this thing is going to require some serious capital to scale, but we will have an answer before someone has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into deciding if it's going to work or not.
Cameron Halliday (41:39):
So that was the big risk is trying to figure out how you get to a no as fast as possible is actually a weird way of framing it, but what are the red flags and how do I identify them as quickly as possible? And in the early days, there are a couple of them that we were like, these are the things that could kill this. Let's prove that these are non-issues or big issues. And we went after them straight away. Corrosion was a big one. How we integrated different assets was a big one. A lot of this walk, crawl, run philosophy about how we would actually deploy this, and how do we answer an operator who says, you're not touching our system. Our answer was this walk, crawl, run approach. Those kinds of questions came up.
Cody Simms (42:15):
Interesting. The boiler approach that we talked about really emerged from a product strategy of how to engage operators without needing to tap into their own process. Is that accurate?
Cameron Halliday (42:27):
Exactly. Yeah. I never framed it like a product strategy, but yes.
Cody Simms (42:31):
Cool. And what's next? What are the big de-risk items right now that you're sinking your teeth into?
Cameron Halliday (42:37):
The system is working in the lab at a pretty large scale. Systems capturing at a rate of half a ton a day, which is quite a lot of gas.
Cody Simms (42:44):
This is the double-decker bus scale.
Cameron Halliday (42:46):
I would call this the shipping container.
Cody Simms (42:48):
Oh, okay.
Cameron Halliday (42:48):
The double-decker bus is in build and that's going to be sited at a real site and will capture its own CO2. That is where we're going next. That system will prove everything about the engineering. So that system is designed to run for thousands of hours reliably and safely. And safely is sort of key here. As we move from lab to industry, the expectations and standards go up a whole level, and so we need to make sure that this works well, reliably, safely, and the site is comfortable with what we're doing. And that's really the next big step. And then there's one more leap after that, which is to show that it is cost-effective. So first we show it works, and then we show it's cost-effective, and then we deploy this everywhere.
Cody Simms (43:30):
And how much do you have to adjust the system based on different industrial partners? From steel to cement to paper mills to biomass burning as we discussed, for example?
Cameron Halliday (43:42):
So what's really nice about the crawl, walk is the walk is very, very flexible to that. We've talked about burning natural gas in that system to drive the desorption, but we can actually burn anything there, including biomass or renewable natural gas for the negative emissions. We even have pathways to electrifying that, but what we typically see is natural gas remains cheaper. And this is sort of the argument that carbon capture is generally cheaper than electrifying if it's possible, or at least in most sites that we're dealing with now. That's the pathway.
(44:12):
And then when we deal with integrating into existing assets, that's the next level where things get harder and become a lot more custom. But we feel like once we have proven the technology and once we have years of experience operating this at industrial scale, we'll be in a very good position to go and design those systems well. Really the challenge we have now is it's very hard to go and design those systems because there's still lots of uncertainty around performance and cost and-
Cody Simms (44:38):
Kind of the custom add-on that you need to build as you move up to your next phase is actually more about how to take the fuel source that might be something other than natural gas that you could integrate from the plant itself into your own process.
Cameron Halliday (44:52):
Yeah, exactly.
Cody Simms (44:53):
It's less around the actual emission scrubbing. It sounds like that stays fairly consistent from use case to use case.
Cameron Halliday (44:59):
It does. There are different features of different flue gases that matter. They matter a lot less for us than they do for most other carbon capture materials.
Cody Simms (45:07):
Why is that?
Cameron Halliday (45:08):
What I mean by that is we can handle a very wide range of concentrations very well. We can go up to like 30% CO2 in the flue gas stream. We can go down to 1%. We can go down even lower than that. It works effectively and our materials are very robust. One of the nice things about working with aggressive chemistry, it is pretty aggressive and it doesn't get destroyed by anything. So we co-capture socks and knocks. We can handle contamination with ash and dust. This solution, as a technology solution, was designed from the beginning to be industry to be harsh and aggressive, and that is challenging in a lab, but that is actually attractive in industry. It is robust.
Cody Simms (45:47):
Cameron, I've so enjoyed this conversation. I feel like I've learned a ton. Thanks for humoring some of my very basic questions. But I feel like we got to at least a decent point of understanding of your solution and what you're trying to do and how you're trying to bring it to market. Is there anything we should have covered that we didn't talk about or anything you wanted to make sure to share?
Cameron Halliday (46:05):
We've covered a lot of different things. This has been a great conversation, Cody. I think one thing I'll just end on is emphasizing the scale of this problem is terrifying. The world is emitting billions and billions of tons every year. Tons of gas. A ton of gas is a crazy amount of gas. We need to be deploying all of these things at breakneck speed to even have a chance of getting there, and so we just need to get going. I love these conversations around the pros and cons of all these different things. It's super interesting, but let's build.
Cody Simms (46:35):
I love it. Cameron, thanks so much for your time.
Cameron Halliday (46:38):
Thank you, Cody.
Jason Jacobs (46:39):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (46:43):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (46:52):
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Yin Lu (47:06):
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Cody Simms (47:15):
Thanks and see you next episode.