Startup Series: Permanent Geologic Carbon Storage with Vaulted Deep

Carbon

Jul 11

Julia Reichelstein is the CEO and Co-founder at Vaulted Deep, a carbon removal company that injects carbon-rich waste slurries deep underground into permanent geologic storage. They've come onto the scene quite fast recently securing just north of a $58 million order from Frontier to sequester over 152,000 tons of carbon between now and 2027, which is Frontier's largest commitment yet. They're one of 20 finalist teams still in the mix for the $100 million Carbon Removal Xprize, and one of 24 semi-finalists of the DOE's Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize. Try saying that three times fast.

They also recently announced an $8 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital with participation from Earthshot, Woven Earth, Collaborative Fund and others. We got to know Julia and her co-founder Omar Abou-Sayed as they set up Vaulted as a spin-out of Omar's waste disposal company, Advantek. Vaulted is a complex set of operations based on a relatively simple construct: Humans have been sucking geologically stored carbon in the form of oil out of the ground for 150 years now. What if we could put it back?

Episode recorded on Jun 17, 2024 (Published on Jul 11, 2024)

In this episode, we cover:

Backgrounds of Vaulted's co-founders and the company's mission
How Vaulted turns organic waste into carbon storage
Julia's shift from venture capital to carbon removal
Advantek's history and technological contribution to Vaulted
Technical details of Vaulted's sequestration wells
Types of wells used in Vaulted's process
Community and environmental benefits
Vaulted's business model and financial sustainability
The rigorous process for selecting and processing waste for carbon removal
Comparison of carbon removal strategies and Vaulted's unique approach
Financial and ecological benefits of Vaulted's methodology
Hutchinson Kansas facility's role and historical significance
Vaulted's partnership with Frontier for carbon removal
Vaulted's participation in the $100 million Carbon Removal Xprize competition
Potential global health impact of Vaulted's technology
Open roles and opportunities at Vaulted for furthering its mission

Cody Simms:
Today on MCJ's Startup Series, our guest is Julia Reichlstein CEO and Co-founder at Vaulted Deep. Vaulted is a carbon removal company that injects carbon-rich waste slurries deep underground into permanent geologic storage. They've come onto the scene quite fast recently securing just north of a $58 million order from Frontier to sequester a bit over 152,000 tons of carbon between now and 2027, which is Frontier's largest commitment yet. They're one of 20 finalist teams still in the mix for the $100 million Carbon Removal Xprize, and they're one of 24 semi-finalists of the DOE's Carbon Dioxide Removal purchase Pilot Prize. Try saying that three times fast.
They also recently announced an $8 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital with participation from Earthshot, Woven Earth, Collaborative Fund and others. We got to know Julia and her co-founder Omar Abou-Sayed as they were setting up Vaulted as a spin-out of Omar's Waste Disposal Company, Advantek. Vaulted is a complex set of operations based on a relatively simple construct. Humans have been sucking geologically stored carbon in the form of oil out of the ground for 150 years now. What if we could put it back? And we talk about all this and more, but before we start, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu:
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs:
And I'm Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu:
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms:
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. Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Reichelstein:
Thanks for having me, Cody. I'm really excited to be here.
Cody Simms:
Well, boy, I'm excited to have this conversation because as you and I were chatting about just before we hit record, your two facilities for Vaulted that are live today are two places that are near and dear to my heart, Los Angeles, where I live, and Hutchinson, Kansas, which is where my wife is from, and I have been to more times than I can count. And who would've thought that a company pioneering carbon underground carbon waste sequestration, I'm sure I'm not saying it the way I'm supposed to, has its roots in two places that are very close to my own life.
Julia Reichelstein:
Oh yeah, Cody, we aim to personalize carbon removal. So did it for you.
Cody Simms:
Let's start there. How in the world did you land on Los Angeles and Hutchinson Kansas as being your first two sites?
Julia Reichelstein:
Is it helpful if we just start sort of walking through the history of Vaulted because I think it really paints the picture. So at the highest level, as you mentioned, Vaulted is a carbon removal company. We take organic waste, so sludgy, carbon-intensive organic waste, so plant matter. We let plants capture that carbon. They do it really well through photosynthesis. That carbon is then useful in the economy, right? The human eats it, the cow eats it. Somehow it ends up as sludgy, organic waste think organic waste like biosolids, manures, food and ag waste, paper sludge, anything that's like moisture-intensive, aggregated already by existing industries. Then we take that waste instead of letting it go back out to be put in a landfill or incinerated or spread on land to decompose, we take it, and basically when it's at the end of its life, we take it and we put it deep underground for permanent sequestration.
We are a permanent carbon removal company. We're talking like 3000 plus feet underground, really deep underground for permanent storage. Really the core of the company is that slurry injection technology that we use to put it underground and store it safely, but the his-- thats' kind of high level -- But the history of Vaulted is sort of an interesting one because we just became a carbon removal company. We just became an official company in August of last year. So we're less than a year old as a company, but it's a little bit misleading because there's been sort of decades of work behind the company that we've built now and behind Vaulted. So maybe I'll give you a little bit of an intro on myself and then on my co-founder, because Vaulted is sort of the two of us coming together in some ways. So for me, I'm Julia, I'm co-founder and CEO of Vaulted.
I'm actually coming from a pretty different background. So I spent the first big chunk of my career in international development. I worked in Peru and I lived in Kenya for nearly five years, helping build a FinTech that did alternative data credit scoring. So nothing to do with climate change, but really sort of how do you work with large commercial banks to help them understand risk on their unbank portfolios and trying to increase formal financial access for unbanked populations in emerging markets, which was really exciting work.
I figured out a couple of things. One, I loved working at startups and building things, and then two, was I got to work with a lot of smallholder farmers, especially in East Africa. We were doing parametric crop insurance products on the FinTech side and just seeing really intensely the effect of climate change today. I was working with this smallholder farmer in Western Ethiopia and was going through this very complicated parametric insurance products and payouts and all this, and I just remember he was like, after months of working together, he looked at me and he was like, "That's nice, Julia, but there's no rain."
It hadn't rained in six years, so we're in the seven-year drought in East Africa at the time. I had this moment of like, "Whoa, yeah, that is the real core of some of this work. And sort of if you care about global poverty, if you care about development work, then you have to be thinking about climate change because in my opinion, it's the biggest driver. It's going to be the biggest driver of global poverty in our lifetimes, and it was a big like, I don't know. Growing up in the US I think I always heard climate change will come and it will be bad, and it was like, "No, climate change is here and it is bad and it's really bad for a lot of people."
Cody Simms:
Yeah. Oftentimes in places that if you're living in Los Angeles or even Hutchinson Kansas, you may not see it firsthand.
Julia Reichelstein:
And what that means in terms of different weather patterns, what that means in terms of different pests, what that means in terms of food security. I mean, if you're a smallholder farmer and you don't have rain for seven years, it's really hard to eat. It's just incredibly heartbreaking to see, and it really put me on a different trajectory. I've started economic development and statistics. In undergrad and sort of it put me on a whole different career trajectory. So I went to business school and then really pivoted into climate. I was a venture capitalist at Piva Capital for a couple of years. Piva is now half a billion dollar fund, really focused on climate and deep tech investing. But it was a fantastic experience. I got to see a bunch of different climate technologies and sort of understand how that space is developing, but really got lucky because I got to start in 2020 when carbon removal was really taking off. It was the early days of a lot of these... Now, I'm going to put in quotes, "Household names of carbon removal," right?
So I got to see across a number of different approaches what folks were doing in terms of how do you capture it efficiently, how do you process it efficiently, how do you store it efficiently, and how do you do that at scale in low cost, which was just really a great standpoint to be in or viewpoint to have in the market. It's actually, I'm going to just give a shout-out to you guys, is the MCJ was really a huge part of my life, especially as an investor. I used to listen-
Cody Simms:
Oh, awesome.
Julia Reichelstein:
... to the episodes every single week before I'd go talk to the company, hear the pitch. I would go and listen to the episode and get smart beforehand.
Cody Simms:
Well, that's great to hear. We have a lot of episodes, so at least someone's listening to them. Thank you.
Julia Reichelstein:
No, I literally. This is maybe an overshare, but I literally had a routine where I'm a runner, so I'd run every morning. And before the pitches of that day, I'd go and I'd listen to, I'd go and find that CEO or that company's episode and listen. I'd get smart before I go talk to them.
Cody Simms:
Amazing. Glad to hear it. And we did actually just add filters to our website because the episode page was getting a little bit overwhelming, and now you can filter by sector, by topic, et cetera. So there are ways to find the little categories of episodes that you may be looking for in the future.
Julia Reichelstein:
Oh, very cool. I'm excited for that. Anyway, that was my shout-out. But yeah, basically got to see sort of carbon removal as a whole, and it was from really that standpoint where I was having this feeling of, I only wanted to think about carbon removal. I really wanted to be in it, and so much so that I actually ended up deciding to leave investing, which was honestly a really scary decision. I mean, being a VC, as you know, is a wonderful job. And I loved the team at Piva, and it was really hard to leave such a good job, and I just had this feeling of I really want to build something in carbon removal, and I feel like the time is now just in the industry and how much it's taking off. And something about it felt not to be cheesy, but pretty right in the soul.
I ended up leaving. And then, I actually pretty quickly got connected to my co-founder, actually through Piva. That's a whole other story, but got connected to my co-founder, Omar, Omar Abou-Sayed, and he was working on something completely different, but maybe I can tell you a little about his company. Because when I first met him, he was like, I have basically been building my company Advantek. So Vaulted is a spinoff of Advantek Waste Management Services, which is Omar's company. That company, I'm going to take you on the other side of the-
Cody Simms:
Great.
Julia Reichelstein:
... relationship [inaudible 00:09:23] down to Omar's history. So Advantek really is a company built off of Omar's father's inventions. Omar's father's a fairly well-known geologist. He was one of the inventors of slurry injection. So actually in the '80s out of the Clean Water Act, basically the EPA ruled that you can no longer leave oilfield waste, all that oily rocky water when you drill for oil and gas.
You can no longer just leave that on the Earth's surface when you go and drill for oil and gas. And so they had to figure out something to do with it, which was incredibly expensive, especially in more remote environments. And so Omar's father and some of his contemporaries basically invented for the first time, how do you put solids underground, that slurry injection? How do you actually take that rocky oily water, grind it up and put it right back down underground, right? So you can sort of think about drilling a well near your production well and sequestering all of that carbon, putting it back where it came from, a little bit like cleaning up local environments and sort of cleaning up legacy industry.
Cody Simms:
Let me ask you a couple of questions on that. So I understand, because I think vaulted is where you're going to go with this is you're leveraging some of that technology or much of that technology. I know there are all the different sort of classes of wells that are out there, Class VI wells, et cetera. Can you explain a little bit about what type of well we're talking about here. And is it a concrete well underground or are you simply putting it below the water table to where it's not going to leach into drinking water?
Julia Reichelstein:
So for both of these, it's deep well pressurized injection. So deep well in general think thousands of feet underground. So just to put in your head, a thousand feet is basically an Empire State Building, so multiple Empire State buildings underground, really far underground. If we had visuals, I'd show my slide, which is like the water table is usually in a couple of hundred feet of the surface and we're going way beneath that, and we're always sort of in that. We look for generally a basin structure, right? So we have some sort of confining interval, some sort of cap rock where it's really non-porous rock, like a shale that's sort of capping that layer in. And then we're drilling beneath it and we're going into the basin structure. That basin structure is generally a more porous stone, like a sandstone. That porosity is actually what allows us to at high pressures, dilate that pore space and push the waste into the pore space as we inject.
Cody Simms:
So this is not a constructed physical well that you're putting steel and cement and stuff into to hold. You're actually just drilling deep into the earth's surface, but you're doing it at a depth where there is not impact on things that life depends on, I guess?
Julia Reichelstein:
No, so there's definitely a well, there's definitely a well.
Cody Simms:
There is a well.
Julia Reichelstein:
Yes, I want to be very clear on that. There is a well. You can think about drilling the well and then it's pipe and pipe design. So there's actually two pipes in there, plus cement to surface all the way up and down. So in the geology world, that's one of the highest integrity wells you can have, right?
Cody Simms:
Got it.
Julia Reichelstein:
So you've got literally multiple layers of containment and insurance that there's not going to be any sort of... If there's a crack in one pipe, we have the second pipe and then we have the cement, right? So it's quite well solidified in there. And think about that whole structure. So those two pipes plus cement going all the way 3000 feet or whatever it might be for that specific formation. But I think the thing to note is we're not filling up that pipe. We're pushing the waste through the pipe at high pressures into the sandstone.
Cody Simms:
I got it.
Julia Reichelstein:
So it's going in a plume around the well, and that's really where it's sort of that basin structure, right? So it's never leaving that basin structure. We have that natural geologic containment by picking the right formations, but we're sort of able to put large amounts of waste. We generally think about formation capacity of 2 million tons of waste in any one wellbore that we drill.
Cody Simms:
So this was Omar's company, Advantek, his dad invented this technology to basically take this oil field waste and push it down into these wells. Presumably a big part of the technology here is what's the right geologic place to dig this well and how do you do it, I'm guessing. I assume permitting and creation of these facilities is non-trivial.
Julia Reichelstein:
Exactly, and it's a great point because actually a big part of the IP and the trade secrets and sort of the know-how that we've inherited from Advantek is in site selection. And isn't picking that right geology and making sure that you're actually doing, we call it feasibility studies, where you actually understand the subsurface. Doing that in a really high integrity way where you're looking at the well logs and you're understanding the formations and the capacity and the containment that it has. Because picking the right site is really important for maximizing waste capacity of the site, but then also ensuring containment, ensuring sort of safe operation. So that's a big part of what we do.
Cody Simms:
Back to the question I was asking around the fossil energy and carbon management classifications of wells, or maybe it's EPA classifications of well sites. Are these Class VI wells, just so I understand that, or is this something totally different?
Julia Reichelstein:
Great question. So for us it's Class V. So actually both of our facilities in your hometowns we're all Class V, which is an experimental class of well, but we sort of work with the EPA and think about being able to permit generally 10 to 15 sort of these types of wells under Class V before you have enough instances to create its own class. So that could be a Class VII or Class VIII one day, whatever class we're at. So it's a great call. So we're not Class VI, so I'm sure maybe some people have heard about all of the complexities around Class VI permitting and sort of the backlog there. So we're not in that same queue. It's all sort of Class V permitted, but still fully regulated by the EPA.
Cody Simms:
And was Class V then originally created as an oil and gas waste management vehicle, at least I'm assuming based on your origin story here?
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah. Actually, sorry, that's a good call. So the Advantek wells are not Class V. I'm actually forgetting off the top of my head exactly what class those are in, but those are Class II, I want to say. No, so it's only the two wells we have. So LA and Kansas, which do it with organics, those are Class V.
Cody Simms:
Okay, we just came full circle. I love it. So Advantek started as these oil waste wells. The company learned this methodology for drilling deep and finding the right geological subsurface in which to inject this oil field waste. And then at some point you and Omar met and said, "Hey, maybe there's a carbon sequestration play here," and Vaulted was born of that. How did that happen?
Julia Reichelstein:
Somewhat, exactly. So when I met Omar, he was like, "Look, we own six wells across the US" primarily again, that same slurry injection in the oil field space. I would just also add the nuance that slurry injection is very hard to do. There's not that many players that do it. Most geologic injection is that pure gas or pure liquid. Uniform particle size to put it safely underground easily. It's easy to plug your well, if you've got the slurry, right, the solid-laden liquid. It's a quite hard to do that well at scale. And so really Advantek is a leading expert in slurry injection globally because they've shown time and time again that their technique and how to do it actually maximizes formation capacity and really doesn't plug your well. So they actually have taken wells from their peers that they plugged their well or they weren't being able to maximize their formation capacity and took it over and was really able to extend it.
So that's sort of the history of Advantek and slurry injection. And when I met Omar, he was like, "Yeah, we have sort of these six wells across the US primarily in the oilfield space except we have..." And when he was telling me about the oilfield, I was a little bit like, "That's nice." That's not my world, right? That's not what I'm focused on. And he's like, "But let me tell you about this one site in the heart of Los Angeles." So in Terminal Island, the port of LA, so right next to Long Beach, and he was like, "We've been owning and operating this site for the last five years as Advantek. It uses that same slurry injection technology but really applied to organics for the first time. So we take about 20% of the city of LA biosolids every year. This is post-waste forward treatment facility, post aerobic and anaerobic digestion, human waste, right, from the waste forward treatment facility.
We take about 20% of that and using that same technology, put it right back down underground for permanent sequestration. And the history of tire is a long one. I'm not sure we have time to do it full justice. It was actually originally permitted to be sort of an experiment by the DOE to see if we could do down hole anaerobic digestion to produce biomethane, which was an interesting idea.
Cody Simms:
Sure.
Julia Reichelstein:
I'll cut to the chase there. It's like over a decade, and there's been de minimis amounts of methane ever detected like less than 25 kilograms ever detected at the wellbore. So a bit of a failure of biomethane production, honestly, but pretty good for permanent carbon removal that you're putting all that carbon deep underground. But when I met Omar, he was like, we're doing this. It was built for this experiment. We have this contractual minimum. And everything, we don't take that 80% gets trucked generally 300 miles round trip into the Central Valley. It's spread on land primarily for the purpose of decomposition. There's a lot of regulations obviously of what you can do with biosolids applied lands, you can't grow human food in it. In California, for example, can't go like crops for consumption, primarily decomposed.
Cody Simms:
A lot of it is dumped on crops that would animals then eat it as animal feed, is that right?
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah, it could be a mix of either animal feed or just a non-productive land like a grassland or like a desert desertification land.
Cody Simms:
Got it.
Julia Reichelstein:
It's a mix depending on the specific geography. Everything when it goes back out there, a couple of things happen, right? It decomposes into a combination of CO2 and methane. We've looked at sort of the Central Valley. In general there, it's decomposing primarily into methane, like 70% into methane. So it's not great from the climate perspective of that decomposition. And then obviously, anything that's in those biosolids or in those wastes are now out into local groundwater. When you think about where the water table is, it's really close to the surface. So when we think about water contamination, anything that's getting land applied is going into groundwater. So we think about PFAS, if we think about other pathogens, the inspector general has a really interesting report that came out that's basically like there's 61 known pathogens even in class A treated biosolids that are hazardous for human health.
It is clean land, air, water, environmental cleanliness perspective, but then also for the surrounding community, there's a community health implication as well. And if we think sort of even more broadly in the US and globally, right, there's a fairly big environmental justice component to this because this is very broad strokes, but generally where we dump waste in general, we think about where landfills are or where waste disposal sites are. Those are generally near poor communities and communities of color, so they're disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Maybe we can get into that in a little bit because I think it's a really interesting and part of the work that I'm really excited about. But that's all happening, right, when it goes back out into these local communities. And when I met Omar, he was like, we haven't really been able to scale. They never sold a carbon credit, really advantageous waste disposal company.
We sort of realized that it was our two worlds coming together. My world and the carbon removal world would actually pay for permanent measurable, high quality carbon removal and it really wasn't scaling as sort of a waste disposal solution alone. So it needed those two things. We spent a year plus thinking about what the vision of Vaulted could be and realizing it's not just tipping fee paying waste sort of. We can take all sorts of sludgy waste, some of which we'll pay for, some of which we'll get paid for, but it really means we have that full breadth of scale of flexibility of waste we can take but also meant that we really were a carbon removal company now, and so we had to spin off.
So it took us about a year to really think about what does that look like? How do you carve a company in two? We spun off from Advantek and then we raised our seed round. It was an $8 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital with participation from Earthshot and Collab and Woven Earth, a couple others. And so really that catalyzed sort of spinning off an hour, completely separate standalone carbon removal company that goes after everything with organic waste in that sort slurry injection technology.
Cody Simms:
So many questions that jumped to mind. The first of which is, if the original business was getting paid to put stuff underground, you didn't really care where the stuff came from. You care about how much of it you could put underground because you're getting paid for as much of it as you can put under there as possible. Now you have to think about the counterfactuals of like, "Okay, if this waste didn't go underground, where would it have gone and what would've happened?" For example, if it was going to get laid on farmland that would grow animal feed, now is that farmland going to have to buy more fertilizer that has its own emissions footprints? Some of that sounds super complicated. How do you navigate through all of that and how do you ensure that you aren't just trying to jam as much stuff underground as possible if it's not actually making a difference?
Julia Reichelstein:
Yes, we look intensely at the counterfactual, right, of what would've happened, and we need strong evidence for what would've happened otherwise. When we go and look at new sources of waste, we're doing sort of this holistic calculation of that source of waste. So we really go in and we think about what's the carbon content of that waste? What's the counterfactual, right? So where did it go for the last five years? If they send it to a landfill, we're looking at, do you have your landfill receipts go prove to us that you send it to a landfill for the last five years, or if you incinerated it on site, where's the burn pit proof, right? So all of that kind of stuff, we're really looking at what did happen over the last couple of years to that waste because we include that counterfactual in the LCA.
Do we think about a couple of different things on that counterfactual? Well actually, let me go through my math a little bit. What's the carbon content, what's the counterfactual? How far is it from the well? If we're trucking it, I don't see any of those emissions we account for transportation any on-site processing emissions and then sequestration monitoring. So full-bodied LCA, and we're fully audited by Isometric. There are registry, really excited to be worked with Isometric. I've been frankly blown away by the level of quality and rigor that they bring to the LCA and the auditing process.
Cody Simms:
I saw they just had two very prominent former MCJ podcasts join the team at Isometric with Stacy Kauk from Shopify who was at Frontier. And also Dr. Jennifer Wilcox from the DOE both join Isometric within the last few weeks it seems like, or at least announced it.
Julia Reichelstein:
I'm really excited by sort of all of the work that they're doing in terms of they have a really strong team of scientists on the Isometric team, so they're really quite quality and science focused and forward. But then they've also got a really strong commercial team as well and just a team that thinks holistically about regulation and buyers, but also about how do we operationalize carbon removal at scale?
Cody Simms:
So they help you think through the different criteria of potential sources. If you have a new source of waste showing up, you'll run it by them and say, "Hey, we're thinking about being able to use this as removal tonnage. Does this make sense?"
Julia Reichelstein:
What we do is we're, again, fully on the protocol, which is public. I don't know if I can put links on here, but the protocol. So every single rule [inaudible 00:24:26]-
Cody Simms:
We can share them in the show notes.
Julia Reichelstein:
Every single rule that we follow is on the protocol in terms of exactly how the LCA gets done that math. I mean in general, you can think about it again, what's that carbon content? And then you subtract out all your emissions associated with it. And then there's a biomass accounting feedstock module, which is incredible. Honestly, I think the first of its kind that I've really seen where it goes into detail on what we can and cannot take from a waste perspective. So we think about things like making sure we're not encouraging land use change. So we have to make sure that we're not incentivizing the production of waste, right? And there's a number of different ways that we sort of check that and prove that. We want to make sure that we're not replacing durable storage for other durable storage. We have to prove that it was decomposed within a number of years in the counterfactual rate. And if there is counterfactual use, if it did go to some productive use, we have very clear rules on how you do that accounting.
So if it would've gone to fertilizer, we of course then account for sort of someone else. If we get it, someone else then going and buying sort of more fossil fuel based fertilizer. I think that's right from a planet perspective, because it means you actually are fully taking into account all of the effects of your carbon removal. What I also love about it though is it's actually... Sorry, I'm a business person, so I love incentives and alignment. It's all I think about these days, but I love that it aligns our incentives because if it is going to a productive use, then we have to account for that in our LCA. That ton of waste gets relatively more expensive, and so we are by nature incentivized to pick the waste that are least productively used because it's a better waste to CDR ratio for us out of LCA in the first place.
Yin Lu:
Hey everyone, I'm Yin a partner at MCJ Collective. I'm here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which is 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. 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 Meetup 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:
The next set of questions I have I think hit on some of that, which is... All right, let's use the not simplest technically, but the simplest to understand form of carbon removal, which I think is probably direct air capture. There's too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We are going to suck some of it out and we're going to store it somewhere. There you're taking stuff that's already atmospheric and you're removing it away and putting it somewhere. That's relatively easy to understand, I think. Then you start to think about some of the areas in the carbon credit world that have gotten on the hot seat a little bit like forestry, where forestry you're mostly calculating how many emissions are you avoiding by not cutting this tree down because the tree would eventually if cut down release emissions from it and would absorb fewer emissions in the future from the air.
It's very model-based as opposed to counting atoms-based. It is very rooted in counterfactuals as opposed to rooted in actuals. It sounds like you are somewhere in between these two things, but you're not removing atmospheric carbon. You're removing solid terrestrial carbon and avoiding it being released as atmospheric carbon in the future, but you're also moving atoms through to where you can count the actual number of tons of carbon moving through your system, so you're kind of in between. Is that a crazy way for me to think about how Vaulted works?
Julia Reichelstein:
No, it's not crazy. There's a couple of different ways to slice that pie. The way I generally think about it is avoidance credit. So we think about sort of the traditional carbon markets, which I think a lot of people know have had a somewhat fraught history in terms of quality. I think a big part of sort of the quality issues we've had on the traditional avoidance markets is because avoidance markets are by definition, relying on a non-observable counterfactual. We're saying, "I would've cut down that tree, but because you paid me, I didn't cut down that tree." But we obviously, will never know if you would've cut down the tree or not.
Cody Simms:
Or how many actual emissions of CO₂ that tree would have not absorbed and/or would have released and/or some combination of the two.
Julia Reichelstein:
Exactly.
Cody Simms:
It's a lot of math to trust.
Julia Reichelstein:
It's a lot of math, and I think that's kind of a great way of putting, it's a lot of math. And so that was sort of one world, right? And then I think carbon removal really from at least my perspective of the market when I was a VC at the time really was born as a alternative to that lot of math and a lot of non-observable stuff and saying, "Hey, we can actually look at what carbon are we taking out of the atmosphere, how many emissions are associated with us taking it and processing it, and then where are we putting it, and how do we monitor that?" And we're actually measuring exact things that we're doing. And so that is an active process as you said, and we're actively removing that carbon and storing it somewhere directly.
Cody Simms:
Actively removing it from the earth. You're not actively removing it from the atmosphere, just to make sure I'm understanding correctly how your process works.
Julia Reichelstein:
This is a little semantic. It depends on where you draw the boundary line. If you draw the boundaries all the way up to whoever planted those plants to capture it, then it is, and those plants obviously have captured the carbon from the atmosphere, so it was originally captured from the atmosphere. But you're completely correct, and we think about the take ownership of that carbon when it's already in waste form. So we're not including all of the emissions from growing that plant in the first place and it moving through the whole industrial system. Like we don't do that part. We're really taking ownership of it. And that boundary starts when it's already organic waste already in plant form and about to go be sent to landfill. So exactly right. So we're sort of taking that atmospherically captured carbon but in plant form, and then putting that deep underground.
Sometimes I think it's helpful to think about this stuff is thinking about taking carbon from the short-term carbon cycle of plants continuously sucking up carbon decomposing, re-releasing it and sort of doing that naturally that's sort of a natural short-term cycle. And rocks do that, soil does that, plants, a lot of natural functions do that already. And sort of taking carbon from that short-term re-release cycle into the long duration cycle, right? Where we're sort of actually taking it and putting it deep underground where it's not going to come back out for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. That is the original cycle we disrupted with fossil fuel production, right? Because we actually went all the way down into the deep [inaudible 00:31:13]-
Cody Simms:
Down and pulled it back up and release it up.
Julia Reichelstein:
And so we're sort of putting it down underground and taking it from that short-term to that long term. And that to me is sort of that active permanent carbon removal that we're doing.
Cody Simms:
Put another way, you have this persistent feedstock of carbon supply, which is natural, which is plants are capturing CO2 and generating it, and historically it would just get re-released to the atmosphere. Now you can take it, capture it, and put it way back down underground where the dinosaurs and the dinosaur era plants had been permanently stored until humans released them back up. And so you could think of it as a one-for-one trade-off of the type of carbon that humans have pulled out of the ground and put back up in the atmosphere. So from that perspective, atoms to atoms, you're not taking something out of the atmosphere and putting it underground, but in a carbon accounting perspective, it's quite similar to think of it that way.
Julia Reichelstein:
I think that's fair. And the other thing I would say is we do that direct measurement again, like we look at the waste and we say, take it to the lab. And we say, what's the carbon sample? And we do multiple lab analysis every day of operation. So we're really looking at what's the carbon content? We use that for the math, right, sort of the carbon removal. Obviously, when it would've gone back out to decompose. And so let's say, a landfill or being land applied, it's primarily decomposing into methane. And I would just point out the way we do the math is we don't credit for that avoided methane at all. So we're not doing that sort of really complex math of what would've happened that had avoided this [inaudible 00:32:40] or that. To your point, I try to avoid as much hypothetical math as possible and just look at what can we measure to put that into our carbon removal.
Cody Simms:
So you're basically, ultimately getting paid to put it back where oil used to be, and sort of think about returning more carbon underground, which humans have sucked out of the ground.
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah.
Cody Simms:
And then from a pricing perspective then in theory, it shouldn't be more expensive than a ton of oil getting pulled out of the ground. I would guess, nowhere near that level of pricing expense. You've got to come in below that, I would think.
Julia Reichelstein:
That's an interesting way of framing it. I would say, generally how I think about sort of our costing, especially I'm thinking more on sort of the carbon removal peers, right? If I think about other carbon removal players that do geologic sequestration. And I think to your point, you can do a lot of things with carbon of sort of places to permanently store it. But if we think about putting it back underground, which is where a majority of this excess carbon came from with fossil fuel production, we put it deep underground. There's a lot of capacity down there, but if you do that and you're not us, you generally need to get it in a pure gas or pure liquid form. And so when we think about a direct air capture, you mentioned those big fans, you're taking it, you're compressing it, you generally get into super critical form, you put that deep underground. That can be a couple of thousand dollars a ton right now, or you are doing what some of our other peers do where you're taking the plant capture, the lower cost capture mechanism because photosynthesis doesn't charge you.
Cody Simms:
And doesn't need to burn natural gas to power your operations, for sure.
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah. Yeah. Plants really have it good in some ways, they're very efficient. Basically, taking that waste biomass but then pyrolyzing, right? Or using hydrothermal liquefaction to get to that bio oil, to get to that liquid and putting that underground. The key of Vaulted, right, is because we can take solids, we can take relatively unprocessed organic waste, right? So we can take that organic waste, that sludgy organic waste. We do very minimal processing, right? I'm talking like grinding, mixing, straining, filtering, that kind of stuff. So no low heat, very little energy consumption, off the shelf stuff. And sort of really minimal processing really can take that and put it underground, because we're not trying to process the waste to get to the pure gas or the pure liquid. And that's where the slurry injection unlock comes in, because it means as we just get to skip a big processing chunk of costs. And it also means that we can take this sort of sludgy organic waste, right?
Again, these biosolids manures, anything that's moisture intensive. A lot of other of our peers don't want those types of waste, right? If we think about BECCS, if we think about other types of BiCRS, if we think about even general interest for a biomass for staff, right? For sustainable aviation fuel. In general, a lot of those pathways need dry waste and relatively homogenous waste because doing some sort of combustion on them or some sort of process using heat. And so for them to use our type of waste, they'd have to dewater it and make it more homogenous and probably de-pathogenize it, which is really-
Cody Simms:
Yeah. I was going to say, there's got to be a huge pathogenic component to what you do, I would think.
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah, exactly. But so just for me, that means also that we can get paid to take some of our waste, which I mentioned we get paid to the tipping fee for some of them, but also just means that we don't have as much competition for that biomass. There's actually waste disposal markets for a lot of these wastes.
Cody Simms:
Is the carbon content relatively consistent?
Julia Reichelstein:
It is for per supplier. So if we think about this specific feedlot or this specific waste for our treatment facility, we're seeing fairly consistent carbon contents coming out of those. But obviously, everyone has their own treatment process. So if it went through anaerobic digestion or it didn't, we take end-of-life waste. So if you have AD, great, we'll take it after the anaerobic digester, we'll take that post digestion sludge. But depending on sort of the process and that specific facility, we'll see differences in carbon content between them, which is really why we run that math I talked through in the first place of, what's the carbon content, how far away is it, what's the counterfactual? And we sort of run that through before we decide to take a new waste.
Cody Simms:
Back to the top of our episode. How did Hutchinson Kansas come about?
Julia Reichelstein:
So we were incredibly lucky as a company. Again, we're under a year old, but because we're a spinoff, we basically inherited a mature de-risk technology from all of Advantek's decade of work on the subsurface and slurry injection side. But we also inherited Kansas, a well facility in Hutchinson. This is a really interesting site. It's actually a network of salt caverns, so it's a network of 50 plus salt caverns and that site-
Cody Simms:
I have to bring some Hutchinson trivia to the group. Hutchinson's Salt Mine underground has been a long time. I'm going to bring LA and Hutchinson together again-
Julia Reichelstein:
Oh, wow.
Cody Simms:
... a long time store of many valuable Hollywood archives, including the original film for The Wizard of Oz stored underground because it's dry.
Julia Reichelstein:
Yes. And something from Star Wars too, right? There's some really-
Cody Simms:
Oh boy, you've now surpassed my Hutchinson trivia about it.
Julia Reichelstein:
There's a famous Star Wars memorabilia, I don't know, fact check me on that. Don't quote me on that.
Cody Simms:
All good.
Julia Reichelstein:
Something from Star Wars is down there, but the cool thing is about that is it's basically they store really important stuff down there to show how durable things that go down there are, right? Of how safe that as a storage mechanism is, which is sort of interesting.
Cody Simms:
By the way, the high school mascot for Hutchinson High, just for another fun fact is the Salt Hawks. So there you go.
Julia Reichelstein:
Okay, I love it.
Cody Simms:
It's like a Jayhawk, but it's Salt Hawk.
Julia Reichelstein:
Salt Hawk. I love it. The short is we inherited that site from Advantek and they had already... I mean, so lucky they had already sort of gone through, my co-founder Omar had already gone through that process of permitting it with KDHE. Again, we're fully regulated. So that state level EPA KDHE helped us permit it for a Class V sort of organics permit. And so, when we spun Vaulted off, we were able to sort flip on that site as a permanent carbon removal facility and audited by Asymmetric within a couple of months. We ended up doing 2000 tons within the first couple months of operation, which I'm really excited about, right? Because the whole industry has done something like 25, 30,000 tons ever. And so just for me, I'm all about, we have this mature tech, we have these two sites that are operational and permitted. We should just be absolutely running, focused on speed and scale with quality in mind, but again, fully audited by a Isometric to sort of get as many tons of carbon in the ground as quickly as possible.
Cody Simms:
And so I'm going to guess, correct me if I'm wrong, Los Angeles you said is primarily or heavily municipal waste treated sewage waste, et cetera that you're putting underground. I'm guessing, Kansas is a lot of agricultural waste and whether that's animal or crop that you're then injecting as slurry. Is that accurate?
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah, it's a good mix. So right now we're doing primarily sort of diverted landfill waste, which is sort of mixed woody diverted landfill waste. And then, yeah, have contracted with a number of feedlots, so more manure, livestock waste, and then biosolids as well, and then hopefully a paper mill in the near future too. So Kansas is really also our well where we're able to make sure that we can take each one of those sludgy waste and go through that learning process. Again, it's a standalone well, so piecing in together from sort of that local area basin.
Cody Simms:
Are you able to reverse the economics for these waste providers? Normally, they're paying a tipping fee to get somebody to get the stuff off their hands. Do they still pay you a tipping fee in addition to the credits that you're earning? Or have you flipped the economics back to their direction where they're participating in the carbon removal side of things?
Julia Reichelstein:
It really depends on sort of the waste provider. So sometimes we'll pay to take the waste. Even if it's, let's say, they're not doing anything productive with it, but they just spray it on the backfield with manure, oftentimes they'll just sort of spray it on the backfield. And so even though they wouldn't really pay you to take it, but they obviously want a bit of that cash for the hauling and the loading costs and sort of all that. So depends on the specific waste provider of what that looks like. But in general, I would say for the waste that we do get paid for, those are generally waste that have, again, sort of a waste disposal market already. And they generally tend to be either more pathogenic or more heavily regulated, right? So biosolids for example, you cannot just spread that wherever you want. So the EPA is regulations because it is more contaminated.
But even if we think about hormones and manure, EPA is also sort of increasingly looking at really groundwater testing of, because over application of manure around feed loss is obviously a massive issue, right? That's where we get groundwater contamination and algae blooms and nutrient runoff and all that kind of stuff. And then even sort of the contaminants and paper sludge for example. So in general, if you're paying to send it to a landfill because of regulation, we will think about how do we help you maybe lower your disposal fees as a way to be enticing for our waste partners. But really there's other components as well too, right, because it's also how do we help you lower your liability? A lot of the waste partners that we partner with, especially sort of the larger integrated ones, have litigation, have liability of how they're disposing of their waste. And if they're contaminated, there's PFAS, we're seeing a number of lawsuits.
So we can sort of say, "Hey, we'll take full ownership of that waste. We'll take liability, we'll make sure something really safe is done with it." And again, fully regulated by the EPA to do that. So we're helping you lower your liability. We're also helping you get in front of regulation. So as we see increasing regulation in the waste space against land application of biosolids is becoming sort of more of a thing at the state level. So if you can't land apply it, then you only send it to landfills. Or if we think about again, that crackdown on groundwater testing around feedlots. So we're also helping waste players get ahead of regulation and have an alternative disposal mechanism at their fingertips that's not just sending it to the landfill, because landfills tend to be fairly expensive.
And that's even going up because organics tend to create the largest issue in landfills, it's the biggest cause of leachate, right? And obviously, those methane emissions. And so a lot of landfills don't want organics, which just means that tipping fee for organics and landfills goes up. So it's really for them, it's a waste partner. It's a way to maybe lower your disposal fees, but also limit your liability, get ahead of regulation, get to your zero landfill goals, that holistic package when we work with them.
Cody Simms:
We haven't talked about your frontier deal yet, and huge congrats on that. Let's talk about that. I'm going to get into that by asking you a little bit of a weird question, which is for these waste providers in Kansas that are dealing with cow manure or some sort of EPA regulated PFAS disposal, if they knew that they were paying some company who has nearly 60 million carbon removal deal from Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook and whatnot, to take this off their hands, would those dynamics be different than they are today? Could it create a weirdness with the companies that you work with?
Julia Reichelstein:
It's a good question, but I would say in general, they all know that we are carbon removal company. Anyone that goes to our website is going to figure it out pretty quick. So it's not a secret. And in general, I don't think having secrets is a good way to build a business in the long term. So, it's more of trying to find those waste partners that understand that the reason that we can give them a lower disposal option that also does all those things I mentioned is because there is another market sort of willing to pay for that environmental benefit that we bring.
And so I think a lot of our waste partners are actually quite excited about it because for years, let's think about in the Advantek mind, we were like, "Oh, we're going to charge you more for this disposal mechanism." That's good, all these other benefits, but it's going to be cost more than the alternative. And so, I think in some ways they're quite excited to say, "Hey, you can get all this on liability and it's your landfill and good for the environment," and you can do it potentially at a cost savings. To me, that's a real partnership I'd want to be a part of.
Cody Simms:
Yeah, and I ask that question with no opinion. I ask it as someone who grew up in Kansas, and am trying to think about local businesses having their models change in some way, shape, or form because of a venture backed tech startup that is swimming in Silicon Valley circles. It's just so not what any of these companies are used to working with that I would imagine it opens up conversations that you're having to navigate in some kind of way that you maybe weren't thinking about necessarily when you entered those markets, or maybe you were. I don't know.
Julia Reichelstein:
No, it's a good one. And I would also say, that we think about it from not only a cost perspective, right? Of how much could we pay to take this waste or how much could we get paid. We're again, always thinking about it from a quality perspective. So on the protocol, we have to be on this sort of really, I call it conscientious edge, right? Where we can't pay too much for the waste. So we're actually confined by how much we can pay per ton because we again, can't incentivize the production of waste.
So you could think about in some theory, if we paid thousands of tons per ton of manure, you could potentially incentivize more cattle on that feed stock, right? Which I don't think any of us want. So, it's really like we're hamstrung from a quality perspective on making sure we're not paying too much, and also, we can't get paid too much because we always are financially additional, right? So we have to ensure that that operation wouldn't have happened without the carbon monetization. So we're sort of always on that conscientious edge, making sure that we're sort of walking that line correctly from a quality perspective, and then also making sure obviously, that the economics can work.
Cody Simms:
Okay. Share more about the Frontier deal and how that came about, and maybe give us the specifics of it.
Julia Reichelstein:
Well, I'm really excited to share on the Frontier deal, and it's actually one isn't public yet, so I can't say the full thing. But we basically have, on the waste side, we've signed quite a large partnership with one quite large integrated waste management company in the US. We'll come out with that probably later this summer. But that's for sort of eight wells across the US, sort of these co-located wells.
Cody Simms:
Wow.
Julia Reichelstein:
It's a big one. And I think for us, it really proves that the incumbent waste industry wants to work with us, that there's sort of a win-win on that value proposition in that partnership. And that's for some biosolids as well. So, some ability to get paid to take waste. So I think that's really exciting on sort of the waste side. And then on the carbon side, Frontier, I mean, is obviously such a wonderful buyer in this space. People probably know it's actually 10 buyers, right? So some large tech companies, some large financial institutions put together a billion dollars to commit towards permanent carbon removal purchases. They were our first customer, so they actually gave us a pre-purchase, like a half a million dollar check in right at the time we were spinning off, so I guess fall last year. And we delivered that, I think it was the largest and fastest delivery of a pre-purchase by Frontier.
So we delivered that in January. So it kind of got that going when the site turned on. And that was really the catalyst for them because I think they're really looking for high quality, again, permanent measurable quality carbon removal to come in, but they wanted to off take it from companies that could deliver in the short term and that they felt comfortable that they could actually meet their delivery goals for some of this larger tonnage. And so, then we sort of worked with them quite quickly, just put that off take together. It ended up being a $58.3 million off take between now and 2027. So the next three and a half years roughly for just over 150,000 tons of CDR. As you could imagine for us, that's huge, right? Because not only is that a great stamp on sort of the quality piece, I think Frontier is one of the highest quality buyers in the market, but it also just means that we have that really nice sort of bridge on the revenue side that we know we can get paid a fair price per ton to do the work in the short term.
Cody Simms:
Last question for me is, you also are one of the, is it finalists or semi-finalists for this large Xprize carbon removal competition that's going on with a number of other sort of, as you mentioned, or called them OG carbon removal companies or whatnot. You're one of the new kids on the block in the mix of a number of names that we've had on the pod and we've all heard of. Tell us a little bit more about that process and that competition and how it's going.
Julia Reichelstein:
I'm really excited. I think May was the month of carbon removal lists is what I've been calling it, between Xprize top 20 and then also DOE came out with their top 24 semi-finalists. Really excited that we're on both. Kind of blown away, but really excited by it. So for Xprize, really interesting competition, right? So it's sort of this a hundred million dollars competition for doing durable carbon removal and sort of proving that out. And so we've been in that process for a while where I think in... I'm actually forgetting the exact phase we're in, but we're kicking off site visits and so we're sort of doing that deeper level of diligence. For Xprize, I think it's such a cool way to think about stimulating the market and sort of that top winner we'll get, right, 50 million. I guess, in theory we've got a one in 20 chance of winning $50 million.
Cody Simms:
Pretty good odds.
Julia Reichelstein:
Sure. And there's some amount of cash for the runner ups. But then also on the DOE side, I'm really excited about that one obviously, because it's just so incredible to have a stamp from the US government saying, we in general like this, it's safe and it has high efficacy and it can scale and it could get to low cost. And so just having that stamp I think is huge. You know this, but for permanent carbon removal markets, buyers on the voluntary side buy CDR because they're looking for that real delta in quality, right? They're saying, "I can't be in that Guardian article about the fake deforestation or whatever it is." So I'm really going to pay up, really up hundreds of dollars a ton when I could pay a dollar for that logo for that quality associated logo. And so I'm just having the US government say, "Hey, this is quality, I think is huge for catalyzing sort of the voluntary market as well as the direct government purchasing one.
Cody Simms:
I have one other question since we've talked about government. As far as I understand it, the type of methodology that you use today does not qualify for like 45Q or any of the tax benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act. Is that accurate or are there things that you're able to take advantage of there too?
Julia Reichelstein:
That is accurate, yeah, so we're not under 45Q today. Though we're definitely having those conversations with a lot of our peers because I think a lot of us feel that 45Q should be more tech agnostic. If you sort of hold durability and measurability and quality constant, then hopefully expanding that out to be more tech agnostic is where we'd want to go. But you're correct today, we're not under that.
Cody Simms:
And there's some groups, I think like Carbon Removal Alliance and others that are maybe helping to advance some of those conversations. Is that correct?
Julia Reichelstein:
That's right. And we're in the CRA and really happy to be there. So part of those groups.
Cody Simms:
That's great. All right. What should I have asked or what else should we make sure we cover?
Julia Reichelstein:
When I think about Vaulted at scale, what we could do really as we go more global outside of the US, we have these really strong benefits for local environments and for local communities. When we even think about scaling up in the US, I think that's helpful, not just in having more impact, but also helpful in terms of working with local communities. Community engagement work, permitting work, where we can really come in and say, "Hey, we can help you clean up your groundwater. We can help limit this stuff going back out into your drinking water," all of that stuff.
So I think that's really important. Well, also, when I think globally, I'm just going to pull out Nairobi as an example because I used to live there for so many years, and I saw this firsthand. In a city like Nairobi, there's a wastewater treatment facility. It's two hours outside of town, it charges a tipping fee. So 2% of human waste gets to that wastewater treatment facility. Almost nothing goes there as you can imagine. Who's taking on that cost? And so most of that waste, 90% plus of human waste in the city like Nairobi, gets illegally dumped directly into the Nairobi River. And that river is the main source of bathing water and drinking water for especially lower income population, especially slum populations, which are around the river in the city. That is a huge human health issue, right?
That's a huge development issue like water and sanitation. If we think about leading causes of death, especially among children being cholera, diarrhea, other waterborne illnesses. Not to get too dark, but it's really a strong part of, I think both Omar and I's missions of, yes, we want to fight climate change and do that through carbon removal, but our carbon removal also can really have a dent in helping to clean up and helping sort of solve some of these infrastructure challenges in emerging markets, and also sort of helping a real impact on human health and development side as well. So that's not today, that's not in Kansas and LA, but as we're thinking seriously about global scale in the near term, we're really excited to work with cities and communities where we could have that sort of impact as well.
Cody Simms:
It'd be interesting to think about expanding to those other geographies that maybe don't have the type of stringency that the EPA brings. And your ability not only to divert some of the waste that you talked about, but to maybe also even help the regulatory environments in those locations get formed in some places.
Julia Reichelstein:
Yeah, it could be. I mean, there's a lot of work there, right? On the existing waste infrastructure and then also sort of the regulatory side on subsurface work. Some countries have that more built out than others. When we think about expansion and we think about getting new wells online, we didn't even really talk about this, but most of the team is focused on getting new wells online.
Cody Simms:
I'm sure. Yeah, it have to be. Yeah, yeah.
Julia Reichelstein:
That's the most of what we do, and that's always looking at where's the good geology with that good containment, that basin structure we talked about. Where's the good waste? So where's waste that has high-carbon content, isn't being used productively, is close to those well sites. And then where's the good regulatory? And it's really that three-pronged Venn diagram. And we're looking for where can we permit safely and legally? Where can we get that waste? And then where can we have that geology? And then we're sort of looking county by county in the US now, but also if we think globally, we can think about countries that have that as well, right? So countries that have subsurface regulation and have a lot of waste and have the right geology, and sort of go from there as we scale up.
Cody Simms:
Julia, any calls to action for anyone who's listening, intrigued by what you're doing? I don't know what kind of roles you're hiring for right now or anything else like that that you might want to shout out?
Julia Reichelstein:
Three things. So one is if you work at a large company that has net-zero goals or carbon-neutral goals and you're curious about buying carbon removal, we'd love to talk to you. I mean, we sold a good chunk to Frontier, but we're definitely not sold out, so we're still very much... We got more capacity to sell in the near term too. So if you're a carbon removal buyer, if you are at a company that has organic waste or touches organic waste. We didn't really talk about this either, but we work with a lot of, not just large integrated waste players, but even players in food and agriculture, players that touch maybe some of these sectors that have larger amounts of organic waste. Paper industry, for example.
And you're curious about lowering your disposal fees and lowering your liability and being part of carbon removal. We're always looking for new partners on the waste side, and then we are hiring, all of our jobs are online hosted. I would say, the newest one I just posted this morning is I'm personally looking for junior chief of staff here in San Francisco for sort of a younger career professional, and we're also looking for head of communications and marketing. So those are two top of mind jobs.
Cody Simms:
Well, Julia, I appreciate you joining us today. Congrats on all the progress. It's amazing to see it, given what you said, the relative youth of the company, a testament obviously to the work you're doing. So congrats and I can't wait to follow along.
Julia Reichelstein:
Thanks for having me, Cody. This was super fun. Appreciate it.
Jason Jacobs:
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast
Cody Simms:
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Cody Simms:
Thanks, and see you next episode.