Scrubbing the Sky - Episode 2: Bill Gates & Building a Climate ‘Miracle’

Host Ed Whittingham continues the story behind the development of Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology and its potential role in helping to fight climate change. Ed explores the early days of Canadian cleantech company Carbon Engineering, and how it drew the attention of both Bill Gates and Occidental Petroleum. 

Guests include: 

• Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at Breakthrough Energy
• David Keith, professor at the University of Chicago and a DAC pioneer who founded the company Carbon Engineering

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Learn more at www.scrubbingthesky.com

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Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts.

The podcast is part of the Carbon Herald’s podcast network.

A special thanks to our friends at the Challenging Climate podcast which is available wherever you find your podcasts.

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Transcript

Ed Whittingham: In Jules Verne's 1870 book, 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea, the narrator, a French marine biologist named Professor Pierre Aronnax, receives a last minute invitation from a U. S. government expedition to track down a mysterious sea monster that has damaged two ships. After several months of searching, the expedition attacks what is believed to be the sea monster, but Professor Aronnax is thrown into the sea.

After grabbing onto a hatch on the monster's back, he is led inside what turns out to be a futuristic submarine and introduced to its eccentric commander, Captain Nemo, who travels the seas in pursuit of scientific knowledge. I read 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea as a kid and I loved it. I actually loved Journey to the Center of the Earth more.

But I digress. The submarine, known as Nautilus, has an atmosphere that becomes regularly charged with too much carbon dioxide. An inconvenience normally addressed. By periodically visiting the ocean's surface to replenish the boat's oxygen supply. But when the boat becomes trapped in ice underwater, the carbon dioxide rises to dangerous levels.

Professor Aronnax describes the situation. I was well nigh asphyxiated by the carbon dioxide saturating the air. Oh, if only we had the chemical methods that would enable us to drive out this noxious gas. To absorb it, we would need to fill containers with potassium hydroxide. You see, in my mind, Professor Aronnax speaks with a stodgy British accent.

The approach contemplated by Professor Aronnax is now being embraced on a much larger scale by Occidental Petroleum, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, with plans to remove vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by exposing potassium hydroxide to air. The sky scrubbing technology is called direct air capture, or DAC.

And the specific DAC technology Occidental is deploying was developed by Canadian clean tech company Carbon Engineering. But before being purchased by the U. S. oil giant, Carbon Engineering drew the interest of another giant, one from the tech center, philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates.

Maybe you've heard of him before? In the context of once being the world's richest person? So how did a Canadian physicist and brand new entrepreneur convince the American tech billionaire to invest in this direct air capture startup? And what compelled Gates and a US oil company to bet big on technology developed by this clean tech darling.

Welcome to Scrubbing the Sky, a podcast series about the race to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a planetary scale. This first season focuses on direct air capture, also known as DAC, one of the leading technology pathways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. For those companies that can successfully bring this technology to market, well, it could be a massive windfall.

And for the planet, it could help avert disaster.

Notrees Texas is surrounded by the sort of landscape you might expect. Sunbaked, flat. And as its uninspired name implies, treeless. It feels almost post apocalyptic when dust storms, brush fires, and noxious odors from abandoned oil wells roll through. So perhaps it's fitting that 15 miles outside of town, on a 65 acre parcel of barren land, a pivotal test of humanity's wherewithal to avoid a climate apocalypse.

is now under construction. If we are to meet widely accepted climate targets, it's now virtually certain that carbon dioxide will need to be removed from the atmosphere. That was the conclusion of a 2018 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet at the time, the IPCC also concluded that it was a major risk whether carbon removal was up to the task.

The good news is that options for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are quickly evolving. In the IPCC's 2023 report, carbon removal is given significantly better odds of helping meet climate targets.

Carbon removal entails replicating natural carbon cycles. Just as plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, filters or chemicals can be used to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Then, similarly to how plants convert carbon dioxide to glucose, Which can either be used or stored. Carbon dioxide can be separated and either put into products or stored underground.

As mentioned in episode 1, a leading technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is called direct air capture or by its acronym DAC, and it's receiving significant support around the world. Nowhere is it receiving more support than in the United States. That's where the world's largest direct air capture plant, called Stratos, is being constructed in the Permian Basin in Texas.

There, near trees planted by residents of Notrees to break up the barren landscape, will soon be the equivalent of a vast forest that, once fully built out and operational, will be able to absorb as much carbon dioxide as millions of trees. The town of Notrees just might need to change its name. That's a total dad joke, by the way.

The technology being used for the project was developed by Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company formed in 2009 to do something with the excess carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere, whether that be putting it into products or back underground. And the project is being constructed by Occidental and 1PointFive. A personal disclosure, I have a consulting relationship with Carbon Engineering that includes a non disclosure agreement. So for this reporting, I will rely on publicly available sources of information and interviews with Carbon Engineering's founder, David Keith, about the firm's early history. Bill Gates climate journey began nearly two decades ago when he was transitioning away from leading Microsoft, where he generated unprecedented wealth developing computer software, to embarking on a mission to improve health and development conditions throughout the world.

He was not focused on clean energy at the time, as he believed that the world's richest countries Who were responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions would address the problem. Gates also didn't fathom the catastrophic impacts, particularly on the poor people he was trying to help, that climate change could unleash.

Bill Gates beliefs were challenged in 2006, when a former Microsoft colleague introduced him to a couple of leading climate scientists. He was taken aback to learn that as long as humans continue releasing greenhouse gases, temperatures will be driven higher and higher. That's Numerous follow up questions, which led him to hire the two scientists to educate him on the fundamentals of climate science and transitioning to clean energy.

One scientist was my friend and Energy vs Climate podcast co host, David Keith. The climate scientists we met in episode one, the other was Ken Caldera, formerly an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Sciences Department of Global Ecology, and now senior scientist. at Breakthrough Energy. Ken spoke a bit about this experience in a past episode of Energy vs Climate. 

Ken Caldeira: I do think that Bill Gates is an outlier in that when he's allocating resources to address a problem, he's very efficient in his resource allocation.

And so while I might wish that there were better solutions to this Tax laws, you know, here's a person who I believe is genuinely wanting to do good in the world and has resources to, to do good. And if I'm in a position that I can help him do that more effectively, I feel that, that that's the path right now that I can have the most positive influence.

What really happened was after about two years, Gates understood that the climate challenge was real. At first it was thinking like, Oh, the emphasis really needs to be on development issues because there's many people suffering today. And that, you know, he was thinking, well, maybe this climate stuff is just a distraction.

And you know, after a year or two of going through the science of it, he recognized, Oh yeah, no. And you know, he's very solution oriented and saying, well, look. Okay, I got the idea that climate change is real. What are we going to do about it? 

Ed Whittingham: The number of tutorials, which typically lasted about five hours, eventually reached 25, each preceded by hundreds of pages of reading material that the eager student diligently worked through.

Gates initial belief in some kind of planetary governing system that would prevent a true climate disaster from occurring had changed to a new reality. The world would need to get to net zero emissions quickly to avoid a total climate disaster. As Bill Gates explained in his TED Talk in 2010, 

Bill Gates: I asked the top scientists on this several times, do we really have to get down to near zero?

Can't we just, you know, cut it in half or a quarter? And the answer is that until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. And so that's, that's a big challenge. Now when I use the term miracle, I don't mean something that's impossible. The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle.

Usually, we don't have a deadline where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. Usually, you just kind of stand by and some come along, some don't. This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline.

Ed Whittingham: In episode one, I used the analogy of a bathtub filling up with water to describe the climate challenge. And if you allow, I'm going to use it again. So if the climate is the bathtub and water is carbon dioxide, the bathtub is now overflowing. So we need to both turn down the flow of new water and drain some of the water out of the tub.

By removing CO2 from the atmosphere, carbon removal can help to drain water out of the tub. It can also help with slowing the flow of new water in. Slowing the flow as much as possible, or reducing CO2 emissions. involves massively scaling up renewables and other forms of clean energy. But some of those emissions we need to eliminate will be especially challenging.

For example, decarbonizing long haul flights is technologically challenging and expensive. Or transitioning developing countries to clean energy quickly enough when many struggle just to meet basic needs. 860 million people in the world today still don't have reliable access to electricity. Carbon removal technologies like direct air capture will likely be vital in helping the world get to net zero emissions by 2050, or more realistically, by 2060 or 2070, just as they will likely be vital in helping to actually cool the planet down once we reach net zero.

As we heard from our previous episode, David Keith is a scientist who looks at the climate challenge not only with a deep scientific understanding of the forces at play, but also with a firm grasp of the engineering and public policy impediments defining solutions. Perhaps that is why he has been contingency planning for the planet since he spec'd it in the early 1990s.

that global cooperation to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions would be elusive. He examined climate intervention options that might complement emission reduction strategies should they prove lacking. And some of those options entailed removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A carbon dioxide scrubber, or rebreather, was first used four centuries ago by an eccentric Dutch inventor named Cornelius Drebbel in the first submarine ever built.

Roughly four centuries after the first rebreather was used on the Thames, David Keith came to believe something similar might be necessary to scrub the sky of excess carbon dioxide. His skepticism that the world would mobilize around reducing greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough in the early 2000s was prescient.

Fallback options were needed that didn't rely on full scale cooperation or the consensus of everyone on earth. I spoke with David and asked about the journey that led to starting up 

David Keith: I started writing a paper on what we now call climate engineering dealt with both carbon removal and solar geoengineering.

I started writing that paper in about 1988 or 89. It didn't deal with direct air capture specifically, but it dealt with carbon removal. 

Ed Whittingham: In 2004, he was recruited to the University of Calgary, the heart of Canada's oil patch, to lead a clean energy research institute. But it was unable to garner the support from industry and government that he hoped it might.

With some unexpected time on his hands, he began tinkering in the lab with various direct air capture concepts, seeking to replicate what Cornelius Drebbel had done in a submarine below the surface of the Thames River on a much larger scale. The first step was estimating costs. 

David Keith: When you want to guess costs. You have to ground it on existing technology. If there's some technology that nobody's ever built before, you've got some teleporter that uses zeronium, you just have no idea. You don't know what zeronium costs, you don't know what is the labor hours of the teleporter. You just can't say anything. So if you want to cost, some technology hasn't been built.

The fundamental way to do it is to go and and cost. It is. figure out how you can accomplish that technological task as much as possible with pre existing industrial processes that do have costs. And so, because we wanted to actually do costing, we started thinking about how you could do DAC in essentially a conservative way with pre existing industrial processes.

In 07, uh, I got introduced to Bill Gates and I ended up having more money, kind of, Half or three quarters of a million a year broadly on on climate policy and technology and that allowed me to hire some more postdocs and really get quite a lot more serious. 

Ed Whittingham: Contraptions of different shapes and sizes were built that hosted chemical solutions so that when air was drawn over them, the carbon dioxide molecules in the air would bond with the chemical solution.

The carbon dioxide could then be separated for storage. The greatest challenge was coming up with an economic way of doing it. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is currently about 420 parts per million, or 0. 4%, which means a very large volume of air has to be harvested to retrieve a meaningful amount of carbon dioxide.

Eager students were put to work. Their assignment was to build towers that would draw air past contactors with chemicals reactive to carbon dioxide. Various different designs were tested to find the optimal balance of material costs, operating costs, energy usage, and performance. As they continued their work, David and his team met with some serendipity.

The Discovery Channel approached David with a pitch to be part of their Project Earth TV series. And with it, came some additional money. 

David Keith: The Discovery Program wanted, had this well funded thing where they wanted us to do some, uh, demo that we felt was completely stupid. They wanted us to build a larger tower.

We ended up building a packed tower. This is a tower where liquid dribbles over a corrugated plastic internals that we were not that impressed about, and we recommend it wouldn't be that useful, but pushed by this, what we thought was total nonsense, uh, uh, discovery channel, we ended up building a packed tower, and then we had this Unbelievable discovery, which was that you could turn the liquid flow off and it still captured CO2 because the liquid, the surface was still wet, and we realized we could reduce the energy input a lot compared to the specified liquid flow rate.

And if anything, really started, uh, uh, the idea that led to carbonation was that. 

Ed Whittingham: So, pardon the pun, but the Discovery Channel is a catalyst for that discovery. I think the Discovery Channel actually paid for part of that. Is that right? 

David Keith: Yes, yes. Discovery Channel had such a big budget, they paid for part of it.

To be clear, it's one of these documentaries that tells a bunch of lies. Uh, really, you know, when you look behind the details of what's in a documentary, there's a bunch of stuff that just was not true. But, um, yes, they did pay for stuff and, and that actually helped to move things along. But I knew. That we were really babies in terms of, uh, industrial process design and costing.

I knew we didn't know what we were doing. And so, you know, one thing I've tried to do in my career is bring in people who do know what they're doing and to critique us. So I was looking for somebody who would kind of tolerate our academic nuttiness, but who really had industrial practical experience.

And we ended up with this guy called Bob Cherry, who, uh, was from Idaho National Lab. So he had this kind of national lab academic world. He'd been at Duke. But he also worked at ARCO and actually got some big industrial plants working. So he had a lot of experience. We came and spent the summer with us and he found thousands of things that was wrong and he had tons of critiques.

But really, at the end of the summer, sitting in my office, he said, There's nothing fundamentally stupid about this. There's no reason you couldn't just start marching down and actually commercialize this. And that was the first time that anybody really made me think about that. 

Ed Whittingham: By 2009, David believed he had a concept that worked.

He just needed money to start a company. Who did he approach first? Well, his eager student Bill Gates, of course. I mean, wouldn't you? 

David Keith: I wrote something for Bill that was very Well, very much tuned to Bill, in the sense that it had no flash, no glitz, no color, no diagrams, and it had a big list of reasons it was going to fail.

Ed Whittingham: The business plan he presented is now actually used as a case study in business classes at Harvard University. Like David, it's honest and direct. Apparently among many talents David has, business case study authoring is also one of them. Capturing CO2 from the air at a concentration of 0. 4% might seem absurd, states the proposal. But physics and thermodynamics tell us that capture should be feasible. Gates, along with a few other significant investors, found the plan persuasive. And so the company known as Carbon Engineering was born.

After investing in Carbon Engineering, Bill Gates continued to educate himself on climate action. and investing in other companies focused on climate mitigation, like putting a few hundred million into a next generation nuclear energy company. But most of his focus remained on addressing global health and development through his foundation.

That perspective was challenged in 2015. As part of a worldwide movement initiated by students to get university endowments to divest from fossil fuels, Gates Foundation was pressured by the British newspaper, The Guardian, to divest from fossil fuel companies. At first, Gates resisted. It wasn't clear to him how selling shares in fossil fuel companies, which made up a relatively small portion of the Gates Foundation's investments, could contribute to transitioning the world's enormous energy infrastructure, the foundation for the entire worldwide economy, to clean energy.

His perspective, though, evolved over time, as it became more evident that to meet climate targets, Fossil fuels would have to be displaced and the companies producing them weren't developing viable clean energy alternatives. In fact, in many cases, they were working hard to obstruct the clean energy transition.

Gates also noticed a paradox during the run up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. To meet climate targets, the world would have to find enough clean energy to wean itself off fossil fuels. And avoid a climate disaster. Reconfiguring an industry worth about 5 trillion per year within roughly a few decades would potentially be one of the greatest investment opportunities ever.

So Gates reached out to two dozen wealthy acquaintances to convince them to put money into clean energy startups. A team of experts assembled by Gates would vet the opportunities and help investors navigate the complexities transitioning the world's energy system. The coalition was named Breakthrough Energy and it has since invested in over 40 companies.

In addition to supporting philanthropic and advocacy efforts. Here's Bill Gates himself explaining Breakthrough Energy's vision. 

Bill Gates: Avoiding a climate disaster will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on. Greater than landing on the moon. Greater than eradicating smallpox. Even greater than putting a computer on every desk.

My basic optimism about climate change comes from my belief in innovation. It's our power to invent that makes me hopeful. That's what Breakthrough Energy is all about. 

Ed Whittingham: Ken Caldera spoke about Breakthrough Energy's goal on the Challenging Climate podcast. 

Ken Caldeira: Part of the idea of Breakthrough Energy is that it's much easier to do good when doing good isn't costly.

You know, we like to think that morality and economics are somehow completely disjoint, and we would, you know, that we wouldn't sell out our morality for cost, and the fact people do all the time, and you know, whether we like that or not. It's one thing for rich countries like the United States or Northern Europe or so on.

But if, you know, if you think of the global South where there's all kinds of people in poverty, problems of food access and water access, it's hard to say that somebody whose main concern is keeping themselves fed, keeping shelter, trying to get their kids educated, that they should prioritize. Century scale global issues over their immediate needs.

And, and in a way, you know, worrying about climate change is luxury for people whose immediate needs are pretty well taken care of. 

Ed Whittingham: The preeminent location in the world for enhanced oil recovery is the Permian Basin in Texas, where Occidental Petroleum is by far the largest operator. That's partly because the region's oil reservoirs are particularly amenable to receiving carbon dioxide, and partly because sources of pure carbon dioxide can be found underground.

These deposits were created by volcanic activity deep underground over a million years ago. that released carbon dioxide, which traveled up through cracks in the bedrock and became trapped below impermeable rocks. But what if the carbon dioxide could be extracted from the air instead? Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub, the first woman to lead a major American oil company, as she has been doing since 2016, spoke about this when she addressed the crowd at the groundbreaking ceremony for the massive direct air capture project they call Stratos 

Vicki Hollub: About 10 years ago. We started looking at how we could harness our skills and carbon management to make an impact on the climate and to improve our business. We realized that if we could capture atmospheric CO2 from human made sources and use it to create low carbon products. It would reduce emissions while providing the resources that society needs.

Ed Whittingham: As part of that journey, Hollub and her team discovered that Carbon Engineering, the direct air capture company founded by David Keith, had designed a scrubber that could do exactly what they had in mind, economically remove large volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. On May 21st, 2019, Hollub signed an agreement with Carbon Engineering to build a direct air capture project vastly larger than anything previously contemplated.

Then in fall 2023, Occidental acquired carbon engineering outright. When it's completed by 2025, Stratus will capture half a million metric tons per year of carbon dioxide from the air, with the ability to expand to a million metric tons. A nice counterpoint to the pump jacks. processing plants, compressor stations, drilling rigs, frack sand mines, pipeline corridors, and endless trucks that are scattered throughout Notrees, Texas.

The captured CO2 is intended to be used for what is called enhanced oil recovery, or in this case, using CO2 to recover more oil than is otherwise available through conventional drilling practices. Occidental calls it net zero oil, because more CO2 is injected into and left in the reservoir than what will be released when the liberated oil is combusted.

To be clear, the concept of net zero oil is not without controversy, something we'll cover later in the series. But as the partnership between the two companies took shape, Occidental began to see a much larger market for carbon dioxide. 

Vicki Hollub: As the global climate discussion advanced and nations signed into the Paris Agreement, we realized there were broader applications.

To sequester CO2 and help others decarbonize. The plant we are building here will have the ability to sequester CO2 and saline reservoirs, which creates a carbon removal credit that businesses can purchase to address their emissions.

Ed Whittingham: For Hollub and Occidental. Stratos is a big bet on a technology that simply hasn't existed to date at the scale currently under construction and Notrees today. If it's a success, then the bet should pay off. For Occidental, it's tech partner, carbon engineering. broader DAC community, and the climate. But they aren't the only players racing to develop the first large scale and commercially viable plants using DAC technology.

There's one other company, and only one, currently building DAC plants at commercial scale, and it's called Climeworks, on the next episode of Scrubbing the Sky.

Thanks for listening to Scrubbing the Sky. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your platform of choice. I'm Ed Whittingham. This podcast series is produced by Amit Tandon and Bespoke Podcasts with help from Pat Kelly, Lauren Bercovitch, and Chris Kelly of Kelly&Kelly. Additional support from Paul McKendrick, Eva Voinigescu, our interviewees, and our reviewers.

A special thanks to our friends at the Challenging Climate podcast, which is available wherever you find your podcasts. This series is made possible through the generous support of the Consecon Foundation. The Trottier Foundation, The Grantham Foundation, Linden Trust and Spitfire, and The Auxilium Foundation.

For more information about Paul McKendrick's book that this series is based on, please visit www.scrubbingthesky.com. Thanks for listening.