On Christmas Eve 2023, Doug Chan wasn’t celebrating with family. Instead, he was in Hellisheiði, Iceland with his team, preparing to commission Mammoth — what would become the world’s largest operational direct air capture facility.
Getting there wasn’t easy. After building two successful smaller plants, Climeworks faced its biggest challenge yet in attempting a 10x scale-up of its Orca plant. When the team broke ground, they discovered issues with their newly designed equipment that forced tough decisions. And Iceland’s harsh winter conditions complicated both construction and operations.
In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks to Douglas Chan, chief operations officer at Climeworks, about proving and scaling direct air capture technology. They discuss managing technology risks, choosing the right partners — and what’s next as Climeworks plans for an even bigger facility in Louisiana.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media Podcast at the frontier of climate technology, was it literally like you flip a switch and then you’re seeing the readouts on the amount of capture that you’re getting in various modules or was it more or less dramatic than that?
Doug Chan: It was a bit annoying actually. It was like, is this working? And it’s like, oh shit, we’re looking at the wrong screen
Lara Pierpoint: That happens. It was Christmas Eve 2023, but Doug Chan wasn’t at home celebrating the holidays. He was in Hellisheiði, Iceland with his team waiting to see if all the long hours and the hard work they’d put in over the holiday season had paid off.
Doug Chan: I think you can look at it two ways, right? It’s like, oh, this is crappy. I have to work over Christmas and New Year’s. But no, we had a super energized and super motivated team.
Lara Pierpoint: In one week they planned to announce the grand opening of their newest and biggest direct air capture and storage plant called Mammoth, and if it worked, it would be the largest operational DAC facility in the world.
Doug Chan: Because for us being first to market and demonstrating to the world that direct to care air capture as possible at scale as quickly as possible was really important.
Lara Pierpoint: So on Christmas Eve they flipped the switch for the facility and started checking meters to see if they were storing CO2
Doug Chan: And we’re all kind of staring at the meter saying, oh yeah, we going to get a one kilo. And as soon as we saw that number pop up, it was very binary and a second big celebration for the team. We stored our first tons of CO2 there as well.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m Larry Pierpoint and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years this week I’m talking to Doug Chan, the chief operations officer of Climeworks on proving and scaling direct air capture of CO2 with storage.
Doug Chan: There’s been this massive growth within direct air capture and the various CDR solutions and a lot of that has come about from science and the climate science that’s come out from the IPCC that says net negative or carbon negative solutions required in everyone’s portfolio of carbon management.
Lara Pierpoint: Climeworks is a direct air capture technology company using proprietary tech. They take CO2 out of the air and store it underground.
Doug Chan: We essentially have a machine with fans that vacuum the CO2 out of the air, capture that CO2 in a filter material, which is inside the machine. Then we take that CO2 and we store it underground permanently, and that’s how we remove CO2 from the air.
Lara Pierpoint: And other companies pay DAC providers like Climeworks for this CO2 removal.
Doug Chan: So the way that the various technology providers including ourselves make money is by selling long-term offtake contracts for the CDR carbon dioxide removal that we produce. An ironic way to say you produce CDR, remove CO2 and store it in the ground, but that’s CDR production. We sell that to our customers with SBTI commitments usually who are trying to go on their own net zero journey as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Back in 2017, Climeworks built the world’s first commercial direct air capture plant in Switzerland. They called it Capricorn, and it was the first big step in moving their technology from small scale demonstration to commercialization.
Doug Chan: We used to build these single containerized, we call them DAC ones, so direct air capture ones because they’re a single unit and those were really just demonstrating that direct air capture was possible. But for us to take that step to commercial scale, we put 18 of these together, called it a DAC18 doesn’t really have a catchy name, which is why we gave it a real name. Capricorn.
Lara Pierpoint: Capricorn was placed on top of a waste incineration facility and it used some of the heat from that facility as energy. The energy then ran the fans that moved the air through the filters that capture the CO2. The captured CO2 was then sold for two uses.
Doug Chan: One was to the greenhouse down the road to help the plants grow better and the other one was to Coca-Cola for the bottling of their carbonated water.
Lara Pierpoint: After establishing that their removal technology worked, Climeworks was ready to prove out a new part of their process storage. So in 2021 they opened their orca plant in Hellisheiði,Iceland. That’s the place from the top of the show where Climeworks built its biggest DAC plant ever Last Christmas, more on that in a bit, but Orca was 10 times larger than Capricorn capturing 4,000 tons of CO2 a year.
Doug Chan: So there was a change in size. There was also a change in the commercialization as well. So Orca was direct air capture and storage where we actually took the CO2 and stored it in the earth, whereas like I mentioned, the al that was more capture and utilization, so we’re selling it to somebody who was using the CO2. And the reason we made that second pivot to direct air capture and storage is that’s really what we needed to be able to scale. There’s plenty of storage around the world and ultimately if we want to be negative in our CO2 removal, we need to be storing it and not reusing it otherwise it’s just kind of a circular economy there.
Lara Pierpoint: They also improved the capture technology for orca. It was built using Generation two tech, whereas Capricorn was built with generation one and this new generation among other things, was designed to reduce the capital expenditure per ton of CO2 removed. So armed with a proven capture and storage technology set and a cheaper way to run their plants, Climeworks set out to build their biggest project yet Mammoth AKA, the Christmas Eve project in Iceland once completed, it would yet again be the biggest direct air capture and storage facility in the world capturing up to 36,000 tons of CO2 A year, and they plan to build it right down the street from Orca. But just because they were on their third commercial plant doesn’t mean that they had all of the scaling challenges figured out for Mammoth. They had two particular problems they had to solve to make the plant a success.
Doug Chan: One was how do we improve our balance of plant or our CO2 purification? And then also how do we take our capture units, the technology that we design ourselves from more mass manufacturable scale? Because the first plant only had eight of these collector containers. Orca only had eight, whereas Mammoth had 72.
Lara Pierpoint: So Doug and his team set out to design new container units and to get to work building the mammoth facility. I talked with him about choosing the right partners to build these first of a kind plants, the risks of manufacturing and designing parts in concert and the hard decisions he had to make to keep the project on track because Doug needed Climeworks to be the first to market. You guys decided to do your 10x scale up. Okay. And it sounds like your goal then is really to show that you can operate at this scale. You’ve already built two smaller plans and effectively proved out the base technology. What did you think about going out to finance this? Were you still always considering we’re just going to go ahead and raise a venture round and finance this on balance sheet? Or did you think or try to go out to the infrastructure investment market and say, Hey, we’ve built these two plants, maybe we can get some non-recourse financing for this particular one?
Doug Chan: Yeah, it’s a great question and I think ultimately as companies look to get to scale, especially in direct air capture and once you get to triple digit or even triple digit millions or billions of dollars of CapEx debt financing, non-recourse financing is ultimately going to be needed. The way that we looked at these first plans is really it was more of a build it and they will come type of mentality. It was also one of the challenges for financing on as you build your overall project to be able to go out to project finance companies to have a complete package that you can take for final investment decision. The big ones being offtake contracts as well. So what we’re seeing in the industry at the moment is people are waiting to see that CDI can be deployed before they make the commitments as well. So it’s this vicious cycle. So we still kept it on balance sheet and actually by the time we did get it built and running it being mammoth, what your typical numbers you would expect for offtake contracts by FID, we’d well exceeded that.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay, so you’re basically selling offtake contracts as you’re building it on balance sheet?
Doug Chan: Yes, exactly.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. And let’s talk a little bit about some of the planning and citing decisions. So you mentioned that you put it on the same site as orca. It sounds like that’s a really huge deal that you already have site control, you already know what you’re dealing with in that particular location. So it seems like that makes a lot of sense. Were there any other sites you considered for any other reasons or was that always the obvious choice
Doug Chan: That was quite an obvious choice there? So usually for siding we’re always looking at energy land and storage. And I mean the setup there is just as good as it could be, right? We are right next to the power plant. We can actually get a direct feed from the power plant, which is phenomenal of both heat energy as well as electrical energy and car fix has the wells and knows that geology of that area really, really well. So in terms of minimizing risk as you’re trying to develop a project, develop an asset that was logical, given that we could remove those two constraints inside constraints by selecting that location again. The other one is also just being familiar with the area and familiar with the market so we could reuse some of the vendors that we had used in our first plant. The first plant was kind of built a bit more scrappily. We kind of bought everything and pieced it together. It’s typically how most startups build their first plant, whereas the second one with Mammoth, given the scale of it, we actually engaged a couple of EPC companies and took a different contracting and execution approach as well, which would be more typical of a larger scale project.
Lara Pierpoint: Awesome. Well we’ll definitely get into that EPC question a second, but one other quick question about this, which is why Iceland? That’s a really interesting country of choice for construction. I’m curious how you all wound up there.
Doug Chan: Energy and storage. The two things I’ve mentioned, I mean I think Iceland’s grid is a hundred percent carbon-free energy. So for us to make direct air capture work at scale, having carbon-free energy is important. And then Carbon Fix has a really unique storage method there as well. The mineralization of the CO2 and it gets injected, which allows the CO2 to be turned back into essentially rock in a much, much shorter timeframe. And they’ve proven that technology out there in that geology as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. So let’s talk about hiring an engineering procurement and construction firm. This is always an interesting set of questions to me too because I think there’s a lot of strong opinions, particularly as companies are emerging with their first commercial technology. How much do you control the process and serve as your own contractor and construction firm so that you’re able to pivot and move as fast as you need to have that incentive alignment? The flip side of that is obviously if you bring in a really knowledgeable engineering procurement and construction firm, it brings a lot of comfort to investors. It sounds like there were some reasons to do that from a scalability perspective in your case. So let’s talk about how you made that decision for the Mammoth plant. What were the pieces that you kept in house and what were the pieces that you sent out to an EPC and why?
Doug Chan: So what we did keep in house was the design of the core hardware, so those collector units that you see, and then also for the process engineering nodes out there. So the core heat material balance, the process flow diagram and the process instrumentation diagram. So the process engineering that supports the hardware as well, or you could even say the hardware supports the process engineering because ultimately what we are as our company’s core technology is we’re a process technology company that also has this special hardware. So the hardware design we kept in house, we worked with a few manufacturers to manufacture the collector containers and then we worked with an EPC to then take our process design and turn that into a real facility.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. So you’re sitting here, you’ve got your EPC firm, your design, your site, you’re about ready to start construction on Mammoth. What were the things in your mind and in the company’s minds that were kind of the biggest risks as you were moving forward? You mentioned some of the things that were kind of at the root of the engineering scale up that you were proving out. Is that what you were thinking about the sort of balance of plant scale up the manufacturing of your filtration nodes? What were the pieces that you were really thinking about as you’re getting into this?
Doug Chan: If I was to boil it down to two, one would be say technology risk on our collector containers themselves. And then the second one would be more say your project risk being schedule.
Lara Pierpoint: So let’s start talking about the filter box design and these collector containers. So you had a certain design that you used in orca. How different was the design when you were moving into Mammoth?
Doug Chan: So we took a lot of the learnings and we’d already iterated within Orca itself and improved even the containers that we had designed there. However, one of the things I touched on earlier is there was a scale factor difference. So we’re going from now eight collect containers to 72, and then within these containers there’s filter elements which went from hundreds to thousands. So we actually had to improve the design of the filter elements inside the box to be more mass manufacturable. And that required more of a design change, probably the biggest thing that we did redesign to make it more manufacturable and also to drive the cost down as well.
Lara Pierpoint: And so did you fully design that new collector container and have it all tested and ready to go, or were there some places where you were kind of making some adjustments on the fly?
Doug Chan: We were able to deploy two prototypes at Orca of the collected containers that we used at Mammoth to learn. However, even before that we, and this is kind of just good testing practice as well as that we would do, and we still do component level testing, so single factor component testing as well as subsystem testing too.
Lara Pierpoint: Right, okay. So you’ve got the new design you’ve tested at Orca, you’re sending it off to manufacturing with your new contract manufacturer and you start to build the plant. What happens next? Are these things working as you intend them to?
Doug Chan: Yeah, I wish it was as easy as just flicking a switch and the lights turn on. That’s also why I love working in scale apps and new technology because things don’t go as planned. So one of the elements, and I touched on at the filter element, which is the one that experienced the most design change. While we were testing the prototypes, we actually did see some failures that were earlier than we had expected. And that then comes that decision of, alright, we’re also doing a serial production at the same time. What do we do right? Do we pause everything, redesign? Do we continue manufacturing? So we actually had to go through some quite challenging decisions there with the design and manufacturing team to determine is exactly that balance between schedule and technology as we were moving forward.
Lara Pierpoint: So now Doug has a big decision on his hands pause manufacturing and delay the project or keep manufacturing knowing the filters were not working as they wanted. We’ll hear what he decides to do after the break. And so what did you ultimately do? Did you basically completely redesign these modules and sort of start over or did you keep some of the ones that you had already manufactured? How did you ultimately handle it?
Doug Chan: We decided to continue with the ones that were already there and essentially deploy a field patch or a field reinforcement to strengthen the failure mode that we had seen, but then in parallel also work on an improved design as well so that we could then roll out essentially a retrofit package at a later date.
Lara Pierpoint: Well, this is skipping to the end a little bit, but I’m just curious how that wound up turning out for you at this point. You’ve got a couple months of full operation under your belt, so are the sort of modules that required the fix operating as well as the ones that you redesigned, are there still issues with those?
Doug Chan: Yeah, I mean Band-Aid fixes are band-aids because they’re exactly that. So yes, we are still working through the teething pains of the band-aids and we’ll continue to do that and improve what we have out there. And I think it’s also one of the things where also the team having been through this before, a lot of say production teams are more used to saying, Hey, I’m not going to use this unless it works perfectly. However, having been through a couple of plants as well, the team’s had that experience, that history of, okay, yes, we know that it’s not perfect and we’re going to all need to work together as a team with the project team and the design team to get this thing working as best as we can.
Lara Pierpoint: By the way, just as a comment, I love the attitude that you’re exuding about all of this. I think there’s something about people who come up against a challenge like this, especially in the really sensitive mode of construction who dig in and say, oh, I’m excited to go in and solve this problem and pull out the chewing gum and bailing wire. And it sounds like you and your team had exactly this approach to this, which was probably pivotal for you, that everybody sees this as something we pull together and work through and not as a gigantic setback necessarily.
Doug Chan: Yeah, it is one of the core philosophies that’s required in any startup and hardware startup especially, is that yes, you’re going to come up against challenges and there’s no point pointing the finger at each other. We all just want to get to that end objective of getting this to work. And ultimately the mission that we have is to get to climate relevant scale. So everyone working together and binding together to do that is really, really important.
Lara Pierpoint: So you’re in construction, you are fixing a challenge that you’re having with your container modules, you’re moving forward, but that’s not your only challenge. You’ve mentioned before that in Iceland and that it’s lovely part of the air, a little bit cold and other part of the air. So can you say a bit about what happened in the middle of construction related to the fact that winter came for you?
Doug Chan: Yeah, Iceland in winter is not necessarily the most pleasant place to be. So heaps are kudos to my team and especially my maintenance team that works outside in winter to make this happen during operations and then also during construction. But there are ways that you can shield the team, especially construction teams from these really harsh winter conditions. And that’s by having the various buildings, both the auxiliary buildings, so some of the construction buildings which were kind of like pop-up tents to allow fabrication to continue as well as the main process hall and maintenance hall built as well. We knew we needed to do this and we see it still as well during operations. We have wind limits and wind thresholds after which we don’t go up in cherry pickers because it’s just too dangerous and unsafe for the people to be working. And it’s not just about wind, but also when it’s cold it’s just really hard for the guys to work for long durations outside and service equipment as well. So once we had the buildings, both the permanent and auxiliary buildings built, we could provide temporary heat and then allow efficient construction to continue still didn’t mean that we didn’t have to come in some days and dig for our pipe or our valves that were covered in snow overnight, but it does help for sure.
Lara Pierpoint: Didn’t you have an issue with a water tower as well?
Doug Chan: Yeah, so actually after we started running the plant and were commissioning it during the second winter, the cooling towers which provide cooling for our process, we had isolated and drained it knowing that there was a time offsite for or there wouldn’t be many people on site during that period. Unfortunately, some rains came and filled up one of the valves that had been closed and the cooling tower filled up. And funnily it got so cold that we ended up with a bit of an ice block. Nothing exploded or expanded because it was an open water bath, but it did take a couple of guys a whole day sitting there with a hose just trying to get that ice block to melt.
Lara Pierpoint: These are the things you don’t know you’re signing up for in certain job descriptions. That sounds like that might be one of them
Doug Chan: Standing on top of an ice block and trying to melted is not in anyone’s job description.
Lara Pierpoint: No, but it is very nice to say nothing exploded. So it sounds like you managed through that one. Okay. And then on New Year’s eve of 2024, you start capturing carbon at the Mammoth plant.
Doug Chan: I mean it’s kind of what I would say New Year’s stands for, right? It’s fresh beginnings, it’s heaps of potential. So everyone was super invigorated by having that pivotal moment for us. I remember getting a video from the team there and they were really excited to send that through and it’s like, Hey look, we’ve got this thing capturing. So really, really exciting for me and the company and the people there as well.
Lara Pierpoint: And so this was between New Year’s Eve and 2024 and then it was essentially summer 2024 when you officially commissioned the plant. So say a bit more about what happens in that time. Is that really just kind of like testing and getting the plant up and running or was it also about building the sequestration system over those six months?
Doug Chan: Both of the above. So we really wanted to get the capture units working or the collector containers working as quickly as possible given that that’s the, call it the newest technology. So the quicker we can get that running, the quicker you can get your field learnings. So between that 1st of January, 2024 and then we were then getting the rest of the balance of plant. So those pots and pans I was talking about, the heat exchangers, the pumps, the cooling towers, everything commissioned and functioning as you would expect them to building up the operations and maintenance team and then also having the storage component built out as well.
Lara Pierpoint: And so how’s it all going now? So you’re now six months post commissioning is everything operational, you’re still fixing things?
Doug Chan: We’re still continuing to deploy the remaining collector containers as well to build out the 72, which will be the final configuration. That’s actually one of the advantages of having this modular design is that you can kind of launch very, very early with just a subset of the plant. So 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12 will get us to that 72. And yes, we’re continuing to kind of fight some of those filter element issues that I had mentioned before and ramping both the overall performance as well as the uptime of the facility
Lara Pierpoint: And you’re building a new facility. So let’s talk a little bit about that transition. So from constructing Mammoth to moving in on Cypress, which is now your next and biggest. So can you say a little bit about when you started thinking about the scale up and the plan for the Cyprus plant? Were you at the point of getting close to finishing construction with Mammoth or was it way before that?
Doug Chan: Yeah, it was actually way before that. We have had the US as a potential market on our horizon for a few years now, and one of the reasons for that and what we did eventually see come out was the regional direct air capture hub funding as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. So in terms of building these bigger facilities, we’ve been looking as well at countries where there are subsidies and grants available to help fund some of these larger scale projects. So we knew this was in the making in the us we’ve been going through some early conceptual design already in parallel to Mammoth being designed as well to be ready for eventually when the funding opportunity announcement did come out for Project Cypress that we would be ready to take advantage of that.
Lara Pierpoint: So you already start planning that, you’re going to do Cypress then in Louisiana. So what’s in your mind at this point about how much scale up and whether or now is finally the time to go outside and look for infrastructure financing?
Doug Chan: Well, eventually we have to get to gigaton removal by mid century, right by 2050. And megaton for us is that first kind of sizable step towards getting there. So 10x of tens of thousands gets us to hundreds of thousands of tons a year. And then once you’re building out that infrastructure for a hundreds of thousands of tons a year capture facility, you’ve essentially got the beginnings of your mega ton hub there. So that’s the way we’re looking at the scale up in size. And then now it’s about crafting with the subsidies in place both on the CapEx side as well as the tax credits through 45 Q, the $180 per ton for direct air capture and storage, crafting an overall business case that we can take to the street to see if more traditional infrastructure investment funding is amenable to the market.
Lara Pierpoint: So you really have talked a lot about modularity and that seems so critical and so key across many of the stories that we hear about, not just in the early stages for you, but it sounds like even now that you’re getting to this level of scale up. So can you say about how you’re thinking about that? So it sounds like a hundred thousand tons at one single site, which kind of fits that 10x scaling factor that we talked about as being so magical, but that because of the modularity you offer, does that give you the option then of scaling up to a mega megaton at this site?
Doug Chan: Modularity is key both at the technology component level because we can keep replicating the kind of individual pieces of hardware and then also at the plant level as well. So once we know what that plant roughly looks like, replicating that plant, because once, I mean the classic design one build many becomes part of the lever to be able to scale to a mega ton as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Very cool. And so you’re actively going out and seeking financing for the Cyprus plant at this stage, is that right?
Doug Chan: Yep. So we’re pursuing all various forms of investment, be it project investors, project partners, strategic investors, traditional project financing. So really looking at what the market landscape looks like at the moment.
Lara Pierpoint: And I know you were also part of a direct air capture hub award here, right?
Doug Chan: Yes, exactly. So that was the one that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the regional DAC hub funding. So we were awarded one of the two. I lose track of all the years now, but it was last year and we’ve received the first phase of that, which is the 50 million and then further up to 600 million once we reached discreet milestones in our project development life cycle.
Lara Pierpoint: And are you seeing any evidence yet of how crucial that funding is going to be in terms of attracting the other investors in on the project?
Doug Chan: Yeah, because ultimately when you’re looking at the business case at the end, having that subsidy or that grant locked in improves the overall project economics for other investors that come in. So yes, very important to our overall business case.
Lara Pierpoint: What keeps you up at night most about carbon oxide removal going forward? Is it the markets and the offtake ultimately, and whether that’s going to scale or is it getting financing for these plans? What are the things, is it competitors now that 500 companies out there? What are the things that concern you most?
Doug Chan: Yeah, the thing that keeps me up most is definitely that first one that you mentioned, the market and the demand, because your second one, like you said, the project financing that will come if the demand is there. So having more businesses beyond those first early adopters of CDR commitments to get to scale is actually critical for the entire industry. You mentioned competitors, there’s enough CO2 in the air for everyone to take out, so that’s unfortunately. Exactly. So yes, it’s how do we get the voluntary market to scale? And then there’s that kind of question of like, Hey, what would take that step change up to real demand is probably more a compliance market or a governmental demand as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Let’s do some reflections on how all this went. I think you have such an interesting background that you’ve been in the manufacturing of sort of clean energy products from a lot of different types and a lot of different angles. Looking back on how you scaled up through your awesomely named animal projects now getting into tree projects, is there anything you would’ve done differently?
Doug Chan: I don’t think there is one right answer to scaling technology and new technology. It’s really about getting it done and not being paralyzed by having the perfect solution. And I think that’s a very Silicon Valley mindset, right? It’s like fail, fail fast. You don’t always fail, right? You actually get things to work. But the inverse of that is, hey, you’re not going to have complete information. Let’s do the best that we can with the information that we have at hand and then move forward. And like I said, if a hurdle or a challenge or a roadblock comes up, let’s just work together to solve it.
Lara Pierpoint: I have a question that we ask everybody, which is, if I could wire a hundred million dollars to your company’s bank account tomorrow, what would you do with it? And it’s a kind of an interesting question for you because you’re operating at that scale right now, but I’m still curious, what would you do with an extra a hundred million?
Doug Chan: I loops back to, I think what is most important for the industry as well is using that to stimulate demand. However, we could figure out how do you create a demand stimulation program to allow more companies to enter the market in long-term offtake contracts. This will really help continue to spur the growth of our industry and our plants as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Do you have ideas on what that would look like? I mean, do you think, is it a buyer’s club? Is it just offering incentives to companies to think about this? Is it they need to hire different staff? What is the unlock here around actually getting more companies to buy more CDR credits?
Doug Chan: Solving it with money. It’s almost like a subsidy or a subsidy for the buyer or a buyer’s club or a contract for difference or something. But I think a big unlock is going to have to come from policy. And unfortunately, a hundred million dollars doesn’t write policy.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s a different podcast. But anyway, we’ll leave that one where it is. Well, thank you so much, Doug. This has been a really incredible conversation. I think there’s obviously a ton that folks can learn from you all because you were doing some of the hardest tech in one of the hardest spaces, and the fact that you’re on project number four and counting, I think is a really incredible testament of what you’ve been able to accomplish. So really appreciate your taking the time to tell us your story today.
Doug Chan: Yeah, thanks Lara. And I think project four, or the folk joke as I like to use a lot of direct air capture is currently in its first of a kind stage, but we do, and Climeworks has been able to show that now we’re past that original Folk Valley and now we’re up to a fourth of a kind, which is still a folk but a fourth. And this should really give hope to the industry as well that what we are doing can be done and it can be scaled as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Doug Chan is the Chief Operating Officer of Climeworks. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me Lara Pierpoint. Our producers are Erin Hardick and Daniel Woldorff. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to editors@latitudemedia.com. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at Latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights of the show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.
