A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

The problem with 1 billion tons of CO2 being sequestered naturally-that’s great-but we’re emitting 40 billion tons of CO2 every year. The fundamental premise of our technology is we’re changing the chemistry of natural waters to store carbon, being able to actually demonstrate exactly how much CO2 was captured and stored. Because the worst-case scenario is companies buy offsets as they say we want to reduce our overall emissions, and then it comes out that those offsets blew up in smoke in a forest fire, or it just turns out weren’t being properly accounted.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Dr. Garrett Boudinot. He’s the founder and CEO at Vycarb. He has an incredible resume. Welcome to the program, Garrett.

Matt, thanks for having me.

Well, tell us a little bit about your journey and and what you brought you to the environmental space and what brought you to founding Vycarb.

Yeah, yeah. Have always been a climate guy, an environmentalist. I’m of the generation that, as I was growing up and going to national parks and enjoying wild spaces, I was also learning about how they were being impacted by climate change. And so, very early on, knew that I wanted to study climate change at the time, and and kind of going through university, my PhD, a lot of climate science was around studying the problem, right?

And I remember, you know, several administrations ago, you know, we were still trying to understand how bad climate change could get, so that we could motivate action, so that we could develop policies to stop climate change, and as I was doing my PhD studying global carbon cycling, its impacts on ocean ecosystems, on forest ecosystems, thinking about how CO2 is cycled through the environment, I had what many graduate students have about halfway through their time, which is an existential crisis, where I said, “Okay, I’m I’m studying the problem. I’m convinced of the problem. Fortunately, now many people are convinced of the problem. What are we going to do about it? And at the time, this was many years ago.

There wasn’t a whole lot in the climate solutions world, so I actually went into conservation for a while. Worked at a state conservation agency where that was a kind of boots on the ground climate resilience pathway for me to take. But I had built these skills in global carbon cycling, so always was looking for how I could leverage that scientific understanding and those skills for really solving the big problem of CO2 in the atmosphere, and so that’s when I got the opportunity to to go to Cornell, run that research program, thinking about how we can accelerate some of those natural chemical reactions in the climate system that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. A lot of that happens in soils and in the ocean and water.

So was was studying how we might be able to manage water in soils to to accelerate that natural carbon storage process. And then there is a science entrepreneurial fellowship in the U.S. called the Activate Fellowship, which is designed for you know to help folks like myself with a scientific background who have an idea for a high impact solution to actually scale and commercialize that. So I was fortunate enough to receive one of the inaugural Activate New York fellowships, which was focused on carbon management. At the time, I had this idea. Again, I was doing this work at Cornell. Had an idea for an even different way from what we were doing at Cornell to really accelerate that natural carbon storage pathway using water. Applied to activate, got that fellowship, and that gave me two years of support funding to go from idea to realized solution. That again accelerates, controls, and measures that same natural chemical process that’s happening in the ocean to store CO2, but unlock it for industrial carbon capture and storage.

So tell us without revealing your intellectual property rights, or maybe reveal them and let everybody know the that these are protected, but how how it is that bicarb does what it does to store carbon?

Yeah, so the the natural chemistry is well known in climate science. CO2 dissolves into water, forms carbonic acid, that interacts with naturally abundant elements like calcium or magnesium, and through a very simple charge or pH mediated reaction, that carbonic acid turns into HCO three bicarbonate, which is a dissolved, invisible, inert carbon molecule. That reaction is happening so much all. Over the planet, that about 1 billion tons of CO2 every year are naturally sequestered through that chemical reaction, and that’s been happening over time. Such that over 90% of carbon on the surface of the planet is this dissolved HCO three bicarbonate ion in the ocean.

So just to reiterate, right? Like 90% if we think about soils, forests, grasslands, the atmosphere, oceans. 90% of all of that surface CO2, or excuse me, surface carbon, is bicarbonate floating around in the ocean. The problem with you know 1 billion tons of CO2 being sequestered naturally-that’s great-but we’re emitting 40 billion tons of CO2 every year, and so we we developed a system that’s able to again accelerate control and measure that same reaction, so that we can scale that same chemical process up to meet ideally those 40 billion tons of CO2. So what that means is we have two different technology innovations that we’ve developed. One is a chemical reactor.

It’s a water-based reactor where we take CO2, we form that carbonic acid, we introduce natural sources of calcium and magnesium. Those are typically for minerals, and our reactor accelerates that interaction between CO2 water and the calcium magnesium to produce that bicarbonate at a controlled concentration, such that the bicarbonate is permanent once it’s formed, such that it’s safe, so that it for release into to natural waters where it can be stored in the ocean. And I should have said, you know, once that bicarbonate is is formed in chemical oceanography, we think of it having a residence time of about 100,000 years. And once it’s produced, hangs around in the ocean for 100,000 years. So that’s a very permanent form of carbon storage.

So that reactor that we’ve developed accelerates and controls that for CO2 storage. The other half of the tech stack is a sensing technology, and this is is really the the key unlock that we’ve developed to enable that reactor technology. Because there are a lot of folks trying to use that same ocean carbon chemistry I described for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. The question is, how effective is it? And you know, and to to spare you on the analytical chemistry story, it’s very hard to measure bicarbonate and CO2 in water directly. We developed a sensing technology that allows us to, for the first time in real time, actually measure quantify directly those different carbon molecules in water, so that we can back with that reactor technology control the process flow rates to ensure again that that CO2 is converted to bicarbonate, that it’s permanent, that it’s safe, and demonstrate exactly how much of that CO2 was sequestered.

Fascinating. So how how much faster is your model, your model number one, the chemical based reactor, you know, sequestering HCO three than kind of nature would do it on its own.

Yeah. So within our system, it takes on the order of you know minutes as water flows through that reactor to convert that CO2 to bicarbonate, and we’ve demonstrated this at our pilot scale up to 200 tons per year capacity, which we’re really proud of. That’s a that’s a significant scale for a early stage technology like ours. You know, naturally this is happening where you’ve got relatively dilute CO2 in the atmosphere that’s combining with water vapor in the atmosphere to rain down as carbonic acid and and rain that then naturally weathers rocks. But you’re limited by how much CO2 or carbonic acid you’re forming in the rainwater, the surface area of you know calcium or magnesium that that carbonic acid is interacting with, and so that you know when you’ve got CO2 interacting with magnesium or calcium, that’s relatively quick, but it’s a dilute process. Really concentrating that so that this can serve you know industrial emission sources.

Okay, so the the goal is to scale this up into the billions of tons, you know, range.

Yeah, that’s right. And you know, the nice thing is, as a industrial carbon storage play, right? We are serving the emissions at the volume of a single facility, and that’s you know anywhere. Our sweet spot is anywhere from like 100,000 tons per year to about a million tons per year, and so aggregated these facilities around the world that are emitting you know 100,000 tons, maybe up to a few million tons, that aggregates to our you know let’s say 20 billion. Tons of CO2 from industrial sources per year, so that’s kind of how we get that billion ton scale is by serving different facilities that aggregate into that overall emissions.

So, how would a facility use your equipment, and and how would it kind of core you know combine with you know the stuff that’s already in play in terms of their manufacturing processes.

Yeah. So what we do is we take CO2 at the the source that is being emitted. We install our water reactor on site. That means well, it is helpful when the facility is already co-located with water, which the majority of industrial emitting facilities are co-located with water. So we we pull up water into our reactor, we take that CO2 from the facility, and then the bicarbonate in water that are produced is then just discharged back out into the the water that we’re drawing from. So all of that is to say, it is an on-site full-stack carbon capture and storage solution.

And one of the things I should mention here in that reactor technology, as we’ve developed it, one of the key value propositions and really innovations, breakthroughs that we’ve had is being able to demonstrate that we can take low purity CO2 directly. So most emitting facilities they’re emitting CO2 with a bunch of other gasses, right?

So that can be anything from air gasses into o2 water vapor, but it can also have other other gasses in it, sox, knocks a whole lot. When companies are trying to decarbonize and do the incumbent carbon capture and storage, in order to store or utilize that CO2, it has to be at high purity, and so they actually need a carbon capture technology installed where the CO2 is being emitted to take that low purity CO2 where it’s being emitted and bring that up to 95 plus percent CO2 really pure CO2 so that it can be transported so that it can be injected underground for storage or so that it can be utilized in in some material. What we’re able to do is bypass that stuff. We can take the low purity CO2 directly.

We can take the high purity stuff too, but that means you don’t need a separate carbon capture facility. We can just take that low purity CO2 and permanently store it on site. But then the other thing I’ll mention: if you’re doing the carbon capture and you’re transporting it for geologic storage, the reason you’re transporting it is there’s not a whole lot of geologic storage out there, right? You’re if you’re going to inject that CO2 underground, you’re limited to the very specific geologic reservoirs that are suitable for permanent geologic storage, and that can be saline aquifers. There’s a lot of work on like basalt subsurface mineralization, but it’s very geographically constrained.

As I said, the majority of emitting facilities are on water already, and so not only can we bypass the capture, but we can actually do the storage on site rather than having to deal with transporting the CO2, finding a specific location where it can be stored and utilized.

I have heard some people say that you know, carbon capture isn’t kind of winning on the cost curve, or that the cost curve hasn’t hit like a Moore’s law of kind of you know doubling every you know couple years or something. And I guess the question to you is: Are you are you on that path toward a Moore’s law, incrementally, you know, scaling it to where we’re getting higher yields for lower amounts of energy inputs.

Yeah, 100% and that’s that’s the thing that we’re really excited about. Probably burying the lead now, 15 minutes into the conversation, getting into cost. We we you know that because because it is the potential of our technology to reach really low cost. We’re talking on the order yeah well below $100 a ton in some facilities as low as $50 a ton CO2 all in. The reason we’re able to do that is a we’re bypassing a lot of those steps right. So if you’re going to do traditional carbon capture and storage, as you said, just carbon capture.

You got to use a lot of energy to capture that CO2, regenerate your sorbent or solvent that you’re using, and not just purify the CO2, but compress it to really high pressures so that it can be transported and stored. We’re able to take the low purity CO2 directly, and we work at pretty low pressures, and so both of those are significant. You know, capex, opex, energy savings there, and then you know the transport is is becoming more and more recognized as a significant cost, right?

So if you’re on in the U.S. a class. Well, for geologic CO2 storage, if you’re on that, you’re probably going to be able to do this for pretty low cost, especially if you’re at the you know over a million tons of CO2 emitted per year. the The unit economics work pretty well for traditional carbon capture and storage there, but if you’ve got to build pipeline CO2 transportation infrastructure, or for many places, God forbid, put it on ships and ship it to another country. You’re just adding a ton of cost just in the transportation side before you even get to the the geologic storage or the the utilization.

And so for us, certainly economies of scale, right? And and a lot of that comes into the the reactor size. A lot of that comes into things like transporting the mineral that we need, and then there are some technology advantages independent of scale. Again, just by eliminating some of the pressure and energy components, some of the different technology stacking components for carbon capture and storage, which is what allows us to get to that, you know, sub 100, even $50 per ton.

Yeah, you bring up a point that I hadn’t really thought of too much, which is that there are some countries that are maybe even substantial emitters that just wouldn’t have kind of the geological storage structures to, you know, I don’t know if Germany, for instance, would have, you know, the kind of salt mines that Louisiana has, or places that the U.S. is has a fair amount of it. I mean, it may not be located very closely to some of our serious emitters, but we do have some of it.

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, the U there are a lot of emitters in the U.S. are blessed to have access to CO2 transportation infrastructure or geologic storage. I think my favorite example for the what we would call stranded emissions, right? Emissions that don’t have adequate CO2 storage infrastructure would be Singapore. Singapore has a carbon tax, right, and that’s expanding to 85 sing per ton CO2 in the next few years.

So very strong policy incentives for decarbonization, but there’s no geologic storage there, and so they they actually did a study commissioned with some major energy companies to figure out how are they going to do carbon capture and storage, and the best they came up with is you do carbon capture on the facilities in Singapore to purify that CO2 and pressurize it.

You put that pressurized purified CO2 in bottles. You put those bottles on ships and you ship it to Indonesia, which is where there’s the closest geologic storage. That’s a great example. Like everyone knows, not yes, the costs are enormous, but even just the geopolitical risk, right? Like the the complexity of that value chain just makes it not a viable solution for the country of Singapore. On the other hand, the one natural resource that Singapore definitely does have is coastline, right? In access to to natural water, and so that’s you know an ideal example for us.

I think Europe is a since you brought up Europe, that’s another good one though. I think as folks or facilities have looked at carbon capture and storage and realized the cost of again transporting to you know the Northern Lights project in in Norway is great and has gotten a lot of traction, and has they’ve been positioning that as a CO2 storage hub, but again, going through the actual CO2 transportation value chain requirements just doesn’t meet the necessary cost points for ETS compliance, for example.

So, have you been in conversation with people in businesses, people, government in Singapore to use your technology to to solve that problem?

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, key yeah. So we we’ve got great partners in active project development in a number of different countries around the world. Singapore is certainly one. Japan, we have really close partnerships with groups like Itamitsu, Mitsui OSK lines. Japan’s another. You know, I can give the same story as I did with Singapore for Japan. Lots of emissions, lots of decarbonization incentives, very little domestic geologic storage opportunities. So they’re another great example, and then certainly in Europe, U.S. as well.

So, what’s the what’s the next step in in your company’s journey, Vycarbb’s journey, as to how it’s going to build out? Does it need more capital? What what what’s going on?

Yeah. So, as I said, we’re right now. I alluded to our current pilot that’s in Brooklyn. For the past three years, we’ve been in technology development and demonstration mode. Right, so deploying pilots, learning from those pilots, optimizing, and then scaling up and and iterating on that. So now we’re operating, as I said, at about 200 tons per year. We’ve demonstrated the full stack solution. We’ve demonstrated that we can take low purity CO2 directly. We’ve gotten the necessary environmental discharge permits, and we’ve really shown you know the the demonstration and technology de risk has been a huge accomplishment over the past few years. Now we’re transitioning to scaling and deployments.

So we’ve signed agreements for our next projects that we’ll be able to announce soon. We’re waiting on some some final things from our partners to be able to do that, and that includes both in the U.S. and internationally that are significant scale ups from what we are doing today and across different applications. And so, you know, the exciting thing about our tech is that, especially at that cost point, it enables compliance, or it is economically attractive across sectors that need to decarbonize, as well as geographies with geographic specific decarbonization policies. So, think again: Singaporean carbon tax in the U.S. 40 5q, EU ETS in Europe. So, we’re kind of thinking geographically, but also sectors. Everything from fuels, power, cement, steel, aluminum.

So those are that’s a you know we talked about the geographic scope, but also the sector scope. And so the next projects that we’ll get off the ground next year are going to demonstrate across some of those sectors as well as geographies, you know, you you asked about you know what are the needs there right now. A lot of it has been working with again some of the great partners that we have in project development, in in securing that capital, and so now we’re really transitioning, as I said, to deployment and execution. We’ll be hiring a bunch of folks more on the execution and project management side here just in the next few months.

Okay, so do you have like a private funding through, or have you done some some fundraising through kind of private equity or or that type of thing?

Yeah, most of our funding has been through venture capital, and we’ve got some great investors. Some of them are proper decarbonization or deep tech institutional funds based in the U.S. or internationally. And then we’ve got a lot of one of the things I’m really proud of are the strategic corporate venture capital funds that have invested. So groups like Shell, I mentioned Idamitsu and Mitsui OSK Lines, Rio Tinto, Blue Scope Steel.

So these are you know companies that are really leading the way in deploying decarbonization technologies and carbon capture and storage are you know incentivized to do so across their operations and invested in us to accelerate the rate at which we can deploy with them. But then we’re you know we’ve also got revenue from some other, I’ll say energy majors who we’re working with on project development and future projects. We’ve also generated revenue in the voluntary market, when you use our technology for biogenic CO2, not to get too in the weeds, that’s compliant in the voluntary market.

So we’ve gotten some revenue there, and then on the the funding, the other side is yeah we have benefited from a good amount of public sector funding. Department of Energy, we’ve received a number of grants. I mentioned my Activate Fellowship, which was largely non-dilutive from some philanthropics as well as state and federal funds, and we have some new awards that we’ve just received that will be again, unfortunately, able to announce very soon. And so we’ve got a good blend of you know pools of money that we’ve been able to leverage to get to this stage and beyond.

Well, that’s an incredible story that you guys have created, and just kind of looking out, you know, one year, three years, five years, 10 years. What are what’s on the horizon? How do you see the company kind of growing over that time horizon.

Yeah, so next year we’ll have two new projects on the ground, operational again, one in the U.S. one internationally, and then kind of the the next two years after that, we’ve got a pipeline of four or five, what we call first of a kind, so full commercial scale. We’re talking 100, 200,000 tons per year. Again, those are in partnerships with a lot of our corporate partners across different geographies, where we’ll have those deployed.

You know, our target is 2029. Once we’ve demonstrated at that relevant scale, that first of a kind, you know, 100 200,000 ton per year per facility, we’ll really switch to replication mode, and that’s what’s exciting. I mean, to be very frank, there are companies in the space that have very urgent needs for decarbonization and carbon capture and. They will be the first movers, and then we’ve got lots of companies who have you know 2035 2040 decarbonization goals. What I like to say, they want to be first to be second. They want to see it deployed.

You know, they want to see it deployed somewhere and have someone else kind of de-risk it, and then they’ll be ready to go. And we’ve got a lot of those groups who are who are you know actively working with and and making sure that as we scale up, we’re addressing their you know facilities specific needs so that we can replicate there.

So what what makes the first tier ones want to go first, and and why are their needs kind of more compelling for them? I guess to decarbonize more quickly,

yeah, some of it has to go back to not to not to be a broken record here, but those policy incentives, right? There are certain geographies where the the cost of continuing to emit is becoming a economic burden, and so in some geographies we’re seeing a lot more urgency there because we can help them save money. In other sectors, this is a money-making opportunity. So again, we we’ve confirmed compliance of our technology under the tax credit in the U.S. for carbon capture and utilization 45Q under that utilization pathway.

That’s 85 bucks a ton from the federal government for any facility emitting over a certain volume of CO2 to capture and store their emissions. So in the U.S. there are a lot of you know large companies emitting a lot of CO2, who are recognizing that that CO2 can actually be an additional revenue stream if they can use our technology, and then the final one are I mentioned that biogenic CO2 source as being compliant in the voluntary market. That’s been also where there’s a lot of more urgent interest in our technology because facilities that are, you know, emitting biogas or are in renewable natural gas, where that CO2 can be traced to to biogenic sources. Deploying our technology today can enable them to generate revenue in the voluntary carbon market.

So those are the the highest urgency sectors and customers as we move to 2030, 2035, that’s where that price per ton across certain emissions trading schemes or you know other regulations, the international maritime organizations carbon regulation, or I mentioned the Singaporean carbon tax. I mentioned well, I haven’t mentioned the EU CBM, so the import carbon emissions tax. All of those, the price of CO2 is increasing over time, and I think that’s going to drive a lot more. Well, we’re seeing that’s driving a lot more urgency on the 2030 2035 time frame.

Yeah, it’s fascinating all these different forces that are driving change, or sometimes not driving change. Fortunately, there are some that are driving, and we’ll take that. And I see, you know, I guess one question, just to clarify for the listeners, maybe you could explain the voluntary carbon markets and and how they work for the uninitiated.

Sure, yeah. I’ll try and keep it succinct. A lot of companies have decarbonization goals, and and most companies that emit CO2 recognize they can’t reduce all of their emissions, right? And I should say, you know, when we talk about carbon capture and storage, that’s for what we would call the hard to abate emissions, certainly you know facilities that can move to renewable energies should and largely are doing that. That’s going to help reduce a lot of their emissions. There are some some processes that can be decarbonized through new technologies.

They’re doing that, but there’s still some amount of CO2 that they will need our technology or similar ones for carbon capture and storage, and then if they really want to decarbonize faster, they can rely on what we call offset. So they can pay for someone else to capture and store CO2 or capture CO2 out of the atmosphere. They can, if they’re paying for that, they can put that on their emissions ledger and they can quote unquote offset their emissions ton per ton. So the voluntary carbon market is you know companies who are looking to buy those credits voluntarily to meet their decarbonization goals.

It’s worth mentioning most companies are allocating you know maybe five 10% of their overall decarbonization budgets from offsets, and most have a plan over the next 1020, years to reduce that further, but it means that there are companies today who are willing to pay for other companies to capture CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it, so that they can say, okay, we couldn’t reduce our emission, you know, one ton of emissions on our facility, but we paid for Vycarb to capture and store a ton. Emission somewhere else, and we’re gonna account, or yeah, we’re gonna account that in in our emissions.

And so the final thing I would say is like, once I say offsets, that’s there’s a wide spectrum of the kinds of offsets that are out there, right? And like I think forestry is, or you know, yeah, forest protection, or you know, tree planting trees like there’s there’s lots of different things that you know most folks have heard of. There is a subset of offsets that are what we would call engineered carbon dioxide removal. So that’s you know a technology like ours that’s able to take CO2 that was in the atmosphere, lock that away.

That has a lot more certainty when you’re locking it away, not in you know a tree, but in in something like bicarbonate, it has a lot more permanence, and so there’s typically a you know a premium that companies are willing to pay for those engineered carbon dioxide removal offsets as part of their overall portfolio of offsets, and so that’s where when I say biogenic CO2 going through our system is compliant in the voluntary market. What I mean is, biogenic CO2 is some organism that used photosynthesis to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, and then it turned into biomass, and then that biomass is turned into CO2. When we capture that CO2 and store it as bicarbonate, you can trace that bicarbonate in the relatively near term, back to the atmosphere, and so we would call that a carbon dioxide removal.

Yeah, it’s certainly something that we’ve been dealing with, kind of looking for the best mechanism to offset some of our CO2, based upon you know even a small law firm has you know flights and things like that, and and it’s amazing how quickly it racks up the CO2 with with the everyday usage of technology that we have. So we’ve been looking at different options, and and certainly seeing this engineered kind of tech solution that you you all are offering and and others are offering is seems pretty valuable to know. Hey, I’m definitely locking it up versus I hope I’m locking it up, and unless there’s a forest fire and then it’s kind of not locked up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s exactly right. The you know, and and everyone’s got their own risk profile in their portfolio, but that’s what’s really attractive, you know. And and and I alluded to this earlier when describing our technology. Part of that second half of our tech stack being that sensing technology is exactly to your point there on that certainty, right?

Being able to actually demonstrate exactly how much CO2 was captured and stored, because the worst case scenario is companies buy offsets exactly to your point because they say you know we want to reduce our overall emissions we’re going to buy offsets and then it comes out that those offsets blew up in smoke in a forest fire or it just turns out weren’t being properly accounted, and you know the tons of CO2 that they were saying they were responsible for removing from the atmosphere didn’t actually pan out. It was half of that, and then you’ve got you know liabilities of greenwashing or or or worse.

And so I’m I’m right there with you. It’s been great to see just over the past few years, the market and broader social conversations, recognizing and highlighting the importance of permanent, measured carbon capture and storage or carbon dioxide removal and storage solutions, and that’s been a really good tailwind for us as we scaled.

Yeah, I could definitely see that, and and it’s it’s interesting that the federal government is still funding some some of this. If it’s taxing some emissions at 85 bucks a ton, that’s and that’s below the price point of some of what the work you’re doing. You should have a good incentive to, or companies have a good incentive to use your technology to avoid avoid that tax or or get that incentive. One hundred percent.

And my I mean my favorite yeah story and policy over the past few years is when we go back to 40 5q that tax credit in the U S that was expanded by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act, which was great. What just one of many progressive climate policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, and it was actually maintained in the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Right, so that we’re always thinking about, as you said, there’s a very complex framework of considerations across policy incentives, the certainty of those to be maintained is always a question, but having something like 40 5q be you know maintained in the current administration is a really again good policy tailwind for us.

Yeah, it’s it’s a fascinating area, and I guess do you see a lot of other companies like yours being pulled into? This or is it space that you are kind of dominating?

There are lots. I mean, yeah, we’re we’re one of many different you know companies that have come up in the past 345, years with a new solution to capture and store or capture or store CO2, and everyone’s got kind of their niche on what kinds of CO2 or what kinds of facilities they can play when play in or what their specific mechanism is, I will say I’m not familiar of too many, if any, other technologies that can really call themselves a full stack carbon capture and storage. Again, typically it’s like you’ve got a carbon capture technology, and they’re saying they’re going to win on you know efficiencies or cost or energy.

You’ve got carbon storage technologies that can say they’re going to win based on you know the scalability of you know the or or even some of its lower tech risk and just you know the the kind of project development that they can do. I do think we’re really getting a lot of traction by folks recognizing that we can bypass a lot of that, and I do think that’s going to make the solution that we have the you know a considerable part of the story of decarbonization over the next several decades.

So you’re doing currently a project on the New York East River, and why did you kind of? I guess it shows independent monitoring, showing it’s deacidifying the water with no detected harm to the ecosystem. Why did you choose that particular site for your first project or one of your projects?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, it was a fellowship in New York City, in part funded by New York State through NYSERDA that started by car, and so we’re we’re based in New York. We’re based right at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Our first pilot was very small scale, and was actually out at East Hampton at a shellfish hatchery there, and we said you actually alluded to it. You know, the fundamental premise of our technology is we’re changing the chemistry of natural waters to store carbon.

Is that demonstrating the safety of that is absolutely critical to do any scale, and so working with the shellfish hatchery was really helpful there, and learning from them of what some of the concerns were or benefits of our technology could be, demonstrating that we then scaled up to a longer term pilot at Trust for Governors Island, which is an island right in the middle of the New York City harbor.

The decision there was it they were just starting a climate solutions innovation test bed right when we were starting, and so there was a lot of synergy. Of they wanted to create a platform to stimulate the development of climate technologies, we were looking for a place that had water where we could do more testing, and so we were kind of their pilot of their pilot program, and and so that was just serendipitous, and then we said, okay, now we need a larger scale where getting materials out to an island in the middle of the New York City Harbor just kind of doesn’t make sense anymore. And because we’re based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it’s surrounded by water that just made a whole lot of sense. And the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is a 501-C3.

They were also looking to or had a program to support companies like us in piloting, and so it was just kind of logical. We’re already based there. We have access to water. Let’s do our next project there, and so we worked with New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and a number of other local groups to kind of plan that, and so that’s been great. I will say now we’re at a point where we’ve demonstrated the technology. The next key de risk is actually getting it on an industrial emitting facility. So that’s what those next projects do.

Well, I love the story arc of you going from academia to getting the fellowship to you know then getting partners to to you know scale it up to the next level and now getting industry and and other investors it obviously is a compelling story that a lot of people are are listening to and and you’re making a tremendous amount of progress so kudos to you and the company, anything anybody out in the audience can do to support what you’re up to and and help take it to the next level.

Well, yeah, no, I appreciate that. And yeah, if folks are you know curious and want to learn more or want to support what we’re doing, our website is Vycarbb.com. That’s v y c a r v.com. Got a contact form there. We’re very responsive to that, and so yeah, always looking for you know whether it’s companies who are looking for technologies like ours, whether it’s folks who have their you know skills and experience that have done things similar or want to leverage their you know skills.

Towards what we’re doing again, we’ll we’ll be hiring very soon a number of different roles, or yeah, you you’ve alluded to funding folks that are looking to to support this kind of work across the board. We’re always you know excited, as you said. One of our success stories are the partners and the the people that we’ve brought on board, and so always looking to expand that, and that’s an easy way for folks to to contribute.

Oh, yeah, it’s it’s great work that you guys are doing, and really, it’s inspiring to me because sometimes it’s sometimes kind of easy to get a little bit down on on the magnitude of the problem and and the work that’s going to be need needs to be done to address climate change. It’s it’s great to see great minds working on these problems, making progress, doing incredible work. Kind of inspires us to keep keep marching forward. I would say to the people out there that are maybe similarly situated, hey, here are some some a pathway of how you can move a project forward. This is this is a you’ve demonstrated here. This this can be done if you’ve got some good ideas. Go out there and do them.

Yeah, and going back to my my story of having an existential crisis in grad school, right, and wanting to be part of the the solution that’s that’s the thing that you know gets me up in the morning and just has me really hopeful and optimistic is just seeing the progress that we, as a pretty small team and you know on a defunct naval base in Brooklyn, are able to accomplish and the progress that we’ve had and the partners that we brought on, it is something that you know. To your point, when you actually just get your hands dirty and start start doing the work, you can see that solutions are out there.

Yeah. Well, kudos to you guys, your whole team for for doing this and and making such great progress, and we look forward to you know continuing to roll it out, and we’ll check back with you in in the years to come to to see what next steps and what new breakthroughs you have accomplished.

I look forward to that.

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