Back in January of 2021, Elon Musk tweeted that he'd be "donating $100 million towards a prize for best carbon capture technology." If you're following carbon removal, you probably know he has partnered with the XPrizeorganization to launch a multi-stage, multi-year prize program attracting not only attention but applications from a considerable range of serious science and business minds.
Ocean Visions is a non-profit that supports ocean CDR's research and deployment. Now, it is seeking to help some of the most promising ideas in that space get the attention and support that comes with such a visible prize.
Ocean Visions has selected six teams that will receive support to apply for the prize in the form of technical expertise and physical resources like labs and vessels to develop their technique.
On this episode Radhika and Susan are joined by a panel of representatives from the Launchpad: program manager Nikhil Neelakantan and representatives from two of the teams: Dr. Franziska Elmer the Scientific Lead of Seafields, which is building offshore seaweed aquafarms, and Ben Tarbell the CEO of Ebb Carbon which is developing an electrochemical method for CO2 removal from seawater.
They discuss their methods for removing CO2, why they are applying for the prize, and what they’d hope to accomplish with the proceeds. Susan shares her thoughts on prize programs, and how she thinks they can have the most impact.
Plus- Susan is hosting an event! “How Startups Can Engage with Climate Policy” with Anne Hoskins, Chief Policy Officer at SunRun & Peter Minor, Director of Innovation at Carbon180 — 4pm Apr 8.
Sign-up link below-
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeEpNQ8lWvBz9tp70gR5_SOV9IMZB7IRAInjdcq8uBLB4UR7A/viewform
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the March 31st, 2022 Carbon Removal Newsroom. This week, we’re all focused on oceans, but as always, I have with me Susan Su, who is a partner focused on climate investing at Toba Capital. She also serves as a board member at the Carbon Business Council and a board advisor to the Environmental Voter Project. Hi, Susan.
Susan Su: Hello.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And also joining us this week are three folks who are Ben Tarble, CEO of Eb Carbon. Hi, Ben. Nice to see you again.
Ben Tarbell: Hi, Radhika.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And then Dr. Francisca Elmer, Scientific Lead of Seafields. Hi, how are you today?
Franziska Elmer: I’m doing really well, thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks all of you for joining. And as always, my name is Radhika Moolgavkar. I’m the Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI, and we’re going to dive into the business aspects of carbon removal right now. So back in January of 2021, Elon Musk tweeted that he’d be donating $100 million towards a prize for the best carbon capture technology. So if you’ve been following this carbon removal, you know he’s partnered with the XPRIZE organization to launch a multi-stage, multi-year prize program. And so it’s attracted a lot of attention from everybody from the serious science to the business-minded to just the general public.
That’s a lot of money we’re talking about. Additionally, Ocean’s Vision is a nonprofit that supports ocean CDR research and deployment. And its goal is to help some of the most promising ideas in that space get the attention and support that comes with such a visible prize. And you might have listened to one of our earlier podcasts where Wil Burns was kind of describing the various research hurdles we’re looking at in the Ocean CDR space. So this year, Ocean’s Visions has selected six teams that will receive support to apply for the prize in the form of technical expertise and physical resources like lab and vessels to develop their techniques.
And we are going to be joined by these representatives who I mentioned at the beginning. And I’ll start with the Launchpad program manager, Nikhil Neelakantan, to kind of talk about what is Launchpad and how did you guys select the six teams you’re working with?
Nikhil Neelakantan: Thanks for having us on the show Radhika. I’ve been a regular listener of Nori’s podcast and excited to be here to talk about Ocean Vision’s Launchpad and to share the stage with you guys and with folks from our Launchpad teams. Just before I talk about Launchpad, I’ll just give you a brief introduction to Ocean Visions. So Ocean Visions was born of the recognition that the diverse sectors and disciplines needed to advance effective solutions to problems facing our ocean are often siloed and disconnected. So what we did was we convened and activated a network of members who belong to leading oceanographic research institutions such as the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and others.
And we also have accelerators such as the Creative Destruction Lab out of Canada and other ocean focused NGOs like the Ocean Conservancy in our network. So this network approach hopefully can bridge these silos and accelerate multi-sector initiatives to develop solutions at the ocean climate nexus. And one of our key focus areas has been ocean-based carbon dioxide removal. We really believe that accelerated and expanded research, development and demonstration are needed to address the potentially but really unknown significant role of the ocean in addressing the climate crisis. So that kind of brings us to why Launchpad.
We really think that the 100 million XPRIZE carbon removal can do what similar challenges have done for space flight and aviation in the early 20th century. So we decided to kind of build the Launchpad program with generous support from our donors and really to provide tailored support to the ocean-based teams competing for this prize. I’ll just talk a little bit about the process quickly. So last year we sent out a request for applicants working on ocean-based carbon dioxide removal and who were competing for the XPRIZE. And we received about 50 applications and we quickly screened it down to about 20.
And then a panel of judges that were drawn from our network narrowed it down to 10 whom we interviewed. And then our criteria for selection Really boiled down to feasibility. So for example, was the technology actually ocean-based CDR and did it meet the criteria for the XPRIZE in terms of the negative emissions? Innovation, so could it scale and if successful, could it move the needle given the Scope of the problem and implementation. Were they ready to use the help from our network? So either they were really in field tests or close to being in field tests so that they could benefit from the experts who are in our network.
And so we have selected six teams from that list, but we plan to include more teams once we get this cohort up and running. And I’ll just quickly run down the teams that we selected, but I won’t include the two teams who are here, Seafields and I’m sure they’ll have plenty to speak for themselves. And for more information, please do go to oceanvisions.org slash launchpad. So the teams are Captura. They’re a team from Caltech who has an electrochemical based approach. So they split water molecules into acid and base. And one of their products is high purity CO2 gas, which they then plan to pump under the ocean and sequester underground, like similar to a DAC with sequestration.
FICOS is a team founded by engineers who worked at Google X. They plan on using robotic vessels that will navigate to optimal conditions to grow seaweed. Then they have autonomous, more automation and mechanization which will allow for periodic harvesting where they shear the seaweed at periodic intervals and sink it to the ocean floor. ProFix is developing a low cost modular seaweed farm, which is appropriate for deep water and high energy ocean conditions. So they have innovations that include robotic anchoring and pipeless upwelling. They’re working with other lab based in the Bay Area as part of an ARPA-E project.
They also want to extract protein components from the seaweed for food and then sequester the residue in the ocean. And finally, Running Tide, which is based out of Maine, grows seaweed on buoys, which they then drift out to sea and sink into the deep ocean again for durable storage. They use sensors to quantify this growth and to verify sinking locations. I’ll stop there and let Ben and Francisca talk to you about ebb carbon and sea fields.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, before I jump into the specifics of what Ben and Francisca are doing, first off, if some of our listeners might note that some of the awardees also overlap with Shopify and Stripe and Microsoft, so lots of overlap in these worlds, but I wanted to turn it just to Susan for a second to maybe give us kind of a higher level picture of what you think about First of all, the XPRIZE and what it’s like right now for startups trying to get funding the CDR space.
Susan Su: Yeah, well, I think it’s a, so, okay, I’m probably, caveat, I’m probably going to say a bunch of things that are going to make me super unpopular. I know everybody loves the XPRIZE, but here goes anyway. So the first thing I’ll say is it’s such a great time for startups raising money, CDR startups raising money, and I feel like that needs to be its own separate episode on why that is. You know, whether ultimately that’s a good or bad thing, but suffice it to say, it’s a really, really good time.
And so, you know, I always like, whenever it comes to anything related to climate, I always bring it back to my favorite concept, which is additionality. And particularly when it comes to funding and you’re thinking about these prizes or other types of funding as supposedly these catalytic engines for innovation or ideally for actual scale up of deployment, you really have to ask yourself very honestly, Is there a truly catalytic, is there a truly additional component to this? And so I think that’s actually really important to ask when it comes to XPRIZE, because some of these projects that we see going through XPRIZE, I mean, they’re companies we’ve heard of before.
There are companies even that some VCs have already backed, customers are already there. And I would say, you know, to Nikhil’s point about the first, you know, the XPRIZE being rooted in this, in these early 20th century aviation prizes, you know, the very first one that was like the most notable was awarded to Charles Lindbergh for flying from, I think it was, where was it between New York, he flew across the Atlantic, New York to Paris. So it’s like a really huge deal, right? And at that time, it was about 20 years, 25 years after the Wright brothers had already flown their plane.
So flight was kind of a thing, but it was obviously very niche and nobody had flown across the Atlantic. And so that prize really catalyzed this obscure guy named Charles Lindbergh, who was working as a as a postal pilot for the US mail. To international stardom and suddenly there was this, you know, true waterfall of new innovation and new entrance coming into the market that didn’t happen just when the Wright brothers, you know, took their first flight. And so I think that’s a really great example of, wow, the prize worked.
Now, when it comes to the X Prize, which has been going, you know, climate related X Prize, which has been going for a number of years, we have to really ask ourselves, have we seen that same effect? And I also say like for that very first prize, it wasn’t just like, oh, we’ll give anybody a prize for flying a plane. It was a very specific set of parameters. It was a challenge where not only did you have to fly a plane, you had to fly one across a huge ocean and not die.
And that really unlocked, you know, there’s a certain minimum threshold specifically set to unlock a new category of Really, I think, commercial innovation. And that’s what I, when I see the Elon Musk Prize, I think it’s really, really good for a lot of things, but there aren’t specific parameters around it. For example, there’s no like we, this is how much, you know, in terms of gigatonne scale that we need to remove and sequester. There really aren’t any minimums. And I think, you know, we all know here and Radhika, you know, especially there’s already a lot of technology in CDR.
And a lot of it is getting millions, hundreds of millions of dollars put towards it already. And there are a lot of people already buying CDR. And so what we have to ask ourselves, what is really the purpose of this particular XPRIZE? Besides the fact that Elon Musk is obviously world famous and anything that he puts his name on, especially that’s in the, you know, Like 10 figures or whatever, is going to have enormous PR value which shouldn’t be discounted. I think that’s probably the biggest contribution on a real term basis.
Carbon removal startups don’t need help with funding. And most of them are actually not at the R&D. There’s of course, not to dismiss it, but there’s a lot of R&D, but there’s also just a lot that needs to be at the implementation and scale up stage. And that’s where boring capitalists like private equity, growth equity, project finance, and just straight up banks, that’s who really needs to get involved at that stage.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Susan, you said so much in that, and there were so many great topics for the future. No, no. I mean, that’s what I’m saying. It was like so meaty, but I’m not going to dive into it because I want to give time to our Ocean Launchpad program winners to describe their companies and what they’re doing. So I’ll start with Francisca and Seafields, and maybe you can just give Our listeners an overview of what you’re doing and how it maybe differs from other types of growing seaweed as a carbon sink.
Franziska Elmer: Thank you. Yes. So what we are going to do or what we are planning to do, and there’s a lot of R&D that still has to go into this because it’s such a new field and we need to find out a lot of things first, working offshore, Sinking to the deep sea and the impact. So at least in our CDR field, there’s a lot of R&D still going on. But our basic idea is to use seaweed called Sargassum. And anybody who’s been to the Caribbean in the last few years will know what Sargassum is because it is really abundant on the beaches and making havoc for the local communities and tourism.
But it’s also an amazing seaweed. So I got some fluid tents and net tents that we want to work with are pretty much the only seaweeds that are never attached to the sea floor. So they have little ladders that make them floating. So it’s self floating. And unless other seaweeds that need to be attached and therefore need to be close to the shore or need to have lines or something else, if they want to go offshore, this seaweed is already offshore naturally. And we just have to farm it out there and make sure we keep it together in a farm and then harvest it.
It’s also a very fast growing seaweed. If you give it enough nutrients, it can double in about one to three weeks in size. So that means you can have a standing stock and take about 5% of that standing stock every day. And still keep your standing stock because it is adding that much new biomass every day, which I think is amazing. The way we want to grow the seaweed, we want to go to the South Atlantic Gyre. This is an area in the Southern Atlantic where all the currents get together, which means everything that is inside kind of gets kept in that area.
There’s a lot of plastic accumulating there as well. And it’s the equivalent to the Sargasso Sea that is in the Northern Atlantic that actually for hundreds of years, these currents have kept the Sargasso in an area where it naturally is and where it’s also protected because it is such a good ecosystem. So we want to go to the Southern equivalent of that. And at the moment, there isn’t many nutrients in the surface water there. Because of how gyres are, they are nutrient poor. So in order to grow our sargassum, we need nutrients.
And the way we want to bring these nutrients there is with upwelling pipes. So we want to get the nutrients who are a few hundred meters below the surface up with counterflow stommel pipes. So these are pipes that have water from the top flowing down. And then inside having smaller pipes where the water from the bottom is flowing up. And the water from the top can warm up the bottom water so that when it gets to the surface, it is warm enough to stay at the surface and doesn’t go straight down again.
And this is a process because of the salinity difference and the temperature difference. Once you start it, it keeps going on its own. It’s like when you when you use a hose and you pull on it with air until water comes out. And then as long as you keep it lower than the start, it will keep flowing. So this is the same concept. So it will not use a lot of energy to fertilize these farms. And at the same time, we’re bringing oxygen-rich water down so we don’t have no oxygen zone at the bottom further down, which could happen if you have Plankton growing within our seaweed.
Then once we have the seaweed harvested, we want to extract the nutrients and also other components to make products. So we want to bring those nutrients back to our farm or also to farms on land rather than sinking all these really important nutrients down to the deep sea. Once we have the nutrients extracted and the other really good components of the sargassum, it is not really a seaweed that is eatable. Unlike kelp, it’s not a seaweed that you can eat, but there are some components in there that are useful. Then we’re going to compact it together into a bale, kind of like a hay bale, and then sink it as a bale.
And as such, it also will stay together better, have Less area that the deep sea animals can attack to and eat from. So we think that as a bale, it will actually stay intact much longer than if it was sunk just on its own without being compacted. And by extracting the nutrients, we also make sure that it isn’t as much of a food source for the Animals in the deep sea is this already not very popular from what they’ve seen from naturally sinking sargassum, but just by taking even more nutrients away it will become even less popular to be eaten.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks for that overview. It sounds fascinating. And you answered a lot of my initial questions in that description. And finally, Ben, not least, but last, unfortunately, can you explain to us what EBCarbon does and how it facilitates Ocean CDR?
Ben Tarbell: Yeah, you bet. So ebcarbons technology accelerates natural processes that occur in the ocean that safely store excess carbon dioxide as natural bicarbonate. And once it’s bicarbonate, it remains stable there for 10,000 plus years while simultaneously reducing ocean acidification. So there’s two benefits here. One, we draw down CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as bicarbonate, but second, We essentially pump acid out of the ocean. And it’s interesting to note that bicarbonate is by far the largest form of carbon storage in the biosphere. 90% of carbon in the biosphere is in the ocean in the form of bicarbonate.
So we do this through electrochemistry. We take saltwater, usually industrial saltwater flows, so the output of a desalination plant, for example, and we run it through our system, which essentially It essentially separates the salts in that seawater into an acid and an alkaline base stream. And if we return the slightly alkaline seawater to the ocean, it has the effect of converting dissolved CO2 to bicarbonate, which then draws down CO2 from the atmosphere. But you know the net result is carbon dioxide removal that checks the boxes of sophisticated buyers in these markets, and so we provide 100% additionality, we provide 10,000 plus year permanence, and we provide the added environmental benefits of reduced acidification.
EbbCarbon’s about a year old, and so we’ve made some progress. We’ve got a contract with Stripe. They’re our first customer. We have a working commercial scale system that we expect to deploy in the field later this year and start delivering on that contract to Stripe. And we expect to have a price of less than $100 per tonne within the next five years, and we see a pathway to less than $50 a tonne.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So my next question, the reason I’m chuckling is because my next question was going to be how to you, Ben, and how this differs from DAC. And I couldn’t help but laugh in my head because the first thing I thought of is it differs from DAC in that it’s much more cost effective probably. But in other ways, it sounds a little bit like DAC. So can you give our listeners an idea of how it’s different or if it’s similar in any way?
Ben Tarbell: Yeah, so I think the end result is similar. Ultimately, both technologies and approaches are pulling CO2 out of the air. And I expect both DAC and ocean-based removal will be important parts of this equation. So we need both of them and we need both of them to be able to draw down gigatonnes worth of carbon dioxide in order to hit our collective goals for reasonable, reasonable climate, reasonable temperature rise. But the differences are that direct air capture refers to systems that are pulling CO2 directly out of the air. And because of the concentration of CO2 in the air is so dilute, This is hard.
It takes a lot of energy in order to find those few 300 in every million, 350 in every million molecules of air as carbon dioxide. That takes a lot of energy. And so by contrast, what we’re doing is essentially leveraging the natural processes that over millennia have and actually millions of years have pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere using alkalinity in the ocean. And because because we’re leveraging those natural processes and we’re leveraging the scale of the ocean, it requires less energy and therefore ends up being lower cost.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thank you, Ben. So Susan, just curious, kind of after you were talking about your favorite concept of additionality at the beginning, are these the kinds of ideas that meet your test for additionality or how would you characterize that?
Susan Su: And this is in the context of the prize, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, in the context of the prize, exactly.
Susan Su: I mean, I think that when you have... Companies that are willing to buy your product already, it’s kind of like, that is so awesome and good on you, but do we really need, like I see prizes as being really ideally suited to spur, you know, sort of early development level innovation that isn’t really qualified, that is challenged in qualifying for Investment capital. Because once investors see that you’re partnered with Stripe or that you’ve got some other types of kind of commercial commitments, for some investors, that’s enough of a signal to take a bet on you.
And so really it’s all about de-risking those capital commitments. And that’s where I think maybe the prize, whether this prize or another prize could maybe dig a little bit deeper and think about, and this is, you know, maybe this applies to some of the projects and not all of the projects, but think about who really needs this in terms of like, what are the areas that are Promising, but really underfunded from an investor confidence standpoint. And how do we sort of like point the prize at those categories? And again, this comes back to setting some parameters.
Rather than having, you know, on the one hand, having it be open-ended, you’re sort of agnostic as to the technology. But I think we’re sort of past that point in CDR because we know what a lot of the technologies are. And even if the general public doesn’t know them, there are brilliant people in research universities who do have an idea of what a lot of the different technologies are. And I think that it would be great for a prize that has such a high profile, that has roots in the U.
S. government to do that extra work to really work with some of the innovators in the lab to define what those parameters should be so that prize money can really be directed at increasing the total surface area of discovery rather than sort of piling on. There’s so much piling on. Going on already in the capital markets. And that is totally fine if you’re an investor and you’re seeking beta, but it’s not really what prizes like this, in my opinion, are meant for.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Nikhil, I’m kind of curious about your thoughts on that as the program manager for Launchpad and if some of the Concerns or critiques that Susan raised were things that you were thinking about when you were looking at these different projects?
Nikhil Neelakantan: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a valid point there about the additionality of the price, but I think where I differ, and I think Francisca brought this up, is that particularly in ocean-based CDR, there’s a lot that’s still A lot of investment that still needs to be done at various stages, including the R&D. You had Wil Burns on the other day, and he talked about the NASM report, which recommended over $600 million in federal funding for things ranging from monitoring and verification To the impact of these approaches to ecosystems and so on.
And also in terms of the critique of the XPRIZE, specifically From what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of rigor to their approach in terms of all these aspects. Teams have to go through a fairly extended application process and have to demonstrate one kilotonne of carbon dioxide removal in the 2024-2025 timeframe. I think there’s definitely more to it than PR and I’m hoping that this will bring out more interesting approaches that investors haven’t yet caught on to. And it won’t be kind of not additional, not the same. Maybe by 2024, 2025, these will be things that are also favored by investors.
Optimistic that there’ll be some approaches that surface that are new. And I think we need them all just given the scale of the problem.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So to both of the winners, and I’ll start with you, Francesca, and then move on to Ben. It sounds like applying for this XPRIZE is a lot of work. There’s a lot of VC capital out there as well. So why are you choosing to apply for it? And what, if you won, would you do with the proceeds or the, I don’t know, the prize? So, Francesca.
Franziska Elmer: Yes, it’s surely a lot of work. I spent all of January just applying for the phase one of XPRIZE and it took all of my work days and other people in our company to do it. Why did we choose to apply for it? Because the timeline of having a farm or being able to draw down a thousand tonnes of carbon in 2024, that’s kind of a timeline and ambitious goal for us. We’re still doing R&D to actually get there in that time. So it gives us the ambitious goal to actually get stuff going.
At the same time, also for the phase one, the things we had to do, like the lifecycle assessment, the cost assessment, those are all things we haven’t done yet. But that really helped us now to know as a company, where are we standing with our idea? And also help us to tell this to other investors, to have a good business plan, to really show them, hey, this is what we are planning for. And of course, if we get the X Prize, the phase one X Prize, which is $1 million, that money is going to be in good use because we do need more funding for testing our ideas and then for building the pilot and the first working farm.
But also the PR, as Susan said, that comes with it will be amazing. And that will bring other investors that will bring a lot of things to Seafield. So the PR behind it is really what makes it a price worth going for. That you can say X price is behind this. And I know that their review process has a lot of experts in there. By saying that XPRIZE selected you, it means that you got selected from a lot of other solutions by experts saying that this is one of the best ones.
And then, yeah, the 2024 big XPRIZE money and winning that, that will go towards the actual scaling up because our plan is to have to scale up to one gigatonne by 2029. So once we have our pilot form done and show that the proof of concept is done, the scale up has to go exponentially and that money from the experts will help. But then again, the PR that comes with it will really make it possible to scale up and get all the people on board that need to help with all the things that come with it, not just the financing to actually make this happen.
Radhika Moolgavkar: What about you, Ben?
Ben Tarbell: I mean, I would say that it was a lot of work, but it’s not a lot of incremental work. It’s work that we either had done already or needed to do. And so it’s more a matter of just collating that work into the application form. But early nondilutive investment has tremendous leverage in early stage companies like ours. There’s different flavors of capital and there’s different things that we can do with different parts of the capital stack. But this money enables us to accelerate work that we are doing, but also take risks on higher risk, higher leverage projects that we might not otherwise do.
And so it has the effect of accelerating I think it’s a lot of people who are collaborating things, but it also potentially reduces our risk, enables us to invest in de-risking activities and provide some headroom on the upside if we can play some bets that would be irresponsible with It expands the envelope of potential and it accelerates things. So it’s a different flavor of capital than we might be able to spend otherwise. But certainly the fact that it’s non-dilutive is particularly enticing to us. And then I guess the only other thing I would say is There’s a short window here where we can have a meaningful impact, still measured in decades probably, but it’s not many decades.
We kind of have to invest in everything that’s on the table, including new R&D out of national labs. But if there are startups that are ready to implement and ready to scale, we need to be pouring money on them as well. And it’s not just going to be VC money. There’s going to be other sources of money that are going to have an impact as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So last question to you both, because time is flying. I wanted to ask, what Are your businesses primarily aimed at the carbon offset markets? Francesca, I think you mentioned that you might be developing other products, but aside from the carbon removal marketplaces, what are other revenue streams you’re thinking about? Ben, I’ll start with you and then I’ll end with Francesca.
Ben Tarbell: Yeah, I mean, so we’re primarily targeting carbon removal and the growing markets around carbon removal credits. There are some potential additional ancillary revenue opportunities. The ocean deacidification, ocean acidification mitigation certainly has value and there may be a pathway to monetizing that in the future. The acid we produce as one of our co-products It has value and it’s a low carbon source of acid so there’s additional potential climate benefit to it. So maybe in the beginning we will gain So when we’re connected to the grid, that flexible demand has significant value to supporting additional growth of additional intermittent renewables.
And so there’s potentially revenue from that as well. But primarily we’re selling carbon removal. That’s the reason we exist.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. Thanks, Ben. And Francesca?
Franziska Elmer: Yeah, as I mentioned before, we are looking into being able to extract other products from the sargassum, other materials that can be put into products from engineering plastics, which we are working on the grant together with BASF and our partner CarbonWave. And we just got into the second round. So fingers crossed that we get the grant to be able to work on making engineering plastics from Sargassum and all kinds of other products. So our partner CarbonWave, that is what they specialize in. They make a biostimulant, which is a type of fertilizer.
They are working on vegan leather from Sargassum and they Yeah, they are looking into all kinds of things you can make out of it. And there’s just so much you can make out of algae. And then in the end, you have to think of our farms. They’re really like gardens in the ocean. So there’s not just the sargassum growing. This will attract fish and little crustaceans and everything else. As it is in the Sargasso Sea, it is a protected ecosystem because it’s called the rainforest of the sea. So we also want to take advantage of this rainforest and see, can we have shellfish or fish growing there and contribute to food security and really get that farm as a living farm that isn’t just one algae, but the whole ecosystem and that supports food all over the world and takes away the pressure on the coasts and on the land to produce all our food.
So we have a lot of plans or a lot of ideas, but we just have to try out what works and what doesn’t work and see which avenues we go exactly next to, of course, selling carbon offsets.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s a lovely vision. I wish you the best of luck because it sounds beautiful. Nikhil, I’m going to end with you on this segment and just kind of to get your idea or your opinion on how the launch pad has gone so far and What your hopes are for these six teams and for the Launchpad in the future?
Nikhil Neelakantan: Yeah, thanks so much for this. So it’s really early days for the Launchpad. We’ve just had discussions with these teams to understand their top priorities for the next year. Broadly speaking, they fall into ocean science related problems such as assessing the environmental impact of their processes, modeling and experimental design to evaluate The carbon removal capabilities. Some policy support to understand the regulatory landscape of the processes and the places they operate in. Business support, particularly in helping with connections to potential suppliers and buyers where there are products. So we’ve taken a stock of that and we’re really fortunate to have an extensive network of ocean scientists, policy experts and others who have these skills and are interested in applying them to potential solutions.
So we’ve just started identifying folks from this network and are starting to form teams and we’ll provide updates Including the names of these experts at oceanvisions.org slash launchpad. So I request your listeners to check back in about a month to hear more from us on that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Oh, yeah, go ahead.
Nikhil Neelakantan: Sorry, I didn’t answer your question of what we hope from these teams. Yeah. I mean, we know, I mean, you’ve heard from two of them. They’re all... Very ambitious, trying to build a gigatonne scale carbon removal process, but they’ll face significant challenges along the way, and we want to help address them at an early stage. So really, we see the XPRIZE as a means to a larger goal, helping these teams find a way to Grow, get additional funding and sequester carbon and provide other benefits, including jobs and improved ocean health.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks, Nikhil. I you know, it’s an amazing, amazing organization, and I look forward to seeing what you can do next. And I thank you all for being on. I am going to pivot over to Susan for our good news of the week, and I think there was something else she wanted to Talk about that she might be hosting later in the week as well. So Susan.
Susan Su: Yeah, so we do have some really fun, awesome, good news. It’s not necessarily related to, or it’s not about carbon removal, but I think it has some adjacency to it. So Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, which is the trade association, Recently released their report on battery storage capacity for 2021, and the results are just stellar. We over more than doubled battery storage capacity in 2021 over 2020. If you look at the graph, there’s actually a really great article on it, a great summary in Inside Climate News. But if you look at the graph, it is starting to take the shape of the hockey curve.
And that really just happened in 2020 and 2021. Like 2019 was just like the whisper of the curve. And then 2020 was like, whoa. And then 2021 was just out of this world. So it’s really gone from linear to curve shaped capacity. And I think what’s really important Awesome about this is that the industry was really handicapped last year by the fact that there were enormous supply chain disruptions. And so you really have to like take that number and maybe even add like some percentage to it for a realistic view of where storage is going in the United States.
Now, those supply chain disruptions are going to be here with us for at least a couple more years, but we’re going to see an explosion. Not only in capacity, but also in performance. So it wasn’t just that we doubled, more than doubled, I should keep saying more than doubled capacity, but the batteries themselves were actually proven to last longer and perform better. So like good, good news all around on storage, which is critically important, especially if you think about some of these energy intensive carbon removal activities, batteries are always going to be a friend to anything like that.
And then just as like a little side thing, this was a little piece of news that might have gotten missed by much of the climate community, but it turns out that Koch Industries, you know, the Kochs that fund all this climate denial, There used to be the owners of Dow Chemical and a lot of assets in petroleum, oil and gas. Koch Industries has now become one of the largest investors in batteries in the entire world. Including in batteries for EVs, as well as batteries for manufacturing and industry. And so we’re just seeing this sea change really in storage, which I think is awesome news.
And those were all just in the last week, all that news came out.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. And I think, was there one other thing you might want to say?
Susan Su: So I am actually hosting, I think by the time this podcast comes out, it’ll be in a week on Friday, April 8th, an event that’s free and open to the public. You just have to RSVP. Maybe we can drop the link into the show notes, but we’re doing an interactive discussion with Anne Hoskins, who is the current chief policy officer at Sunrun. And it’s all about how and why and when startups should get involved with policy targeting climate startups. Obviously, Sunrun is no longer a startup, but it did once used to be a startup and they’re very involved.
If you are a CDR company or CDR adjacent, policy is extremely important to you. And so we really need to learn to embrace our friends over on the policy side. So that’s going to be Anne Hoskins, the CPO, Chief Policy Officer at Sunrun. And then we’re also going to have some folks from Carbon 180, which is an NGO focused on Carbon Removal and Policy Advocacy. And we’re all going to have an interactive discussion. It’s not a speaker series. So come ready to discuss and ask questions and we’ll put the RSVP link down in the notes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks, Susan. Make sure the Carbon Business Council folks get notes about that too, because I have not seen it and I’m on that. I do policy all the time and I hadn’t heard about it. So thank you for letting us know. With that, I am going to wrap the show. And I really thank all of my guests for being here today. I wish we could have had hours more to talk about the fascinating technology, the challenges, the policy, the business, but I guess we do that every week. So best of luck to you both.
And for the rest of my listeners, thanks. And we’ll see you next week. Take care. Bye.
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