Can you build the equivalent of 37,000 trees into a suitcase? Twelve, a tiny start-up founded by three Stanford graduates believes its lab holds the secret to reducing climate change. Their technology turns unwanted CO2 into useful products such as car parts, trainers, and alcohol
We’re just outside this unassuming building in berkeley california where a team of 50 people is working on one of the biggest problems for climate change founded by three stanford graduates 12 is trying to take captured carbon and repurpose it so that i can re-enter the supply chain and become the building block for everything from shoes to your next fancy car
We’re going to speak with kendra cool one of the three co-founders and the chief technology officer and she’s going to give us a tour of the lab and just answer our questions about how feasible is this could you explain just in the most basic sense like what is it that you’ve done and what are you aiming to do because when i read it on paper it sounds just
Like crazy ambitious and like you know perhaps like two pi in the sky that sounds extremely difficult um so the core technology of the company is a catalyst that allows us to break apart carbon dioxide molecule and reform the carbon and oxygen and hydrogen from water into new compounds so we can take carbon dioxide you know from anywhere instead of that carbon
Dioxide being emitted to the sky transform it back into essential products or we can you know couple to direct air capture suck that carbon out of the air and then make it into something useful again the idea of reusing the carbon we’ve already extracted is a key part of the circular economy a grand hope that society can re-engineer the way goods are designed
Manufactured and recycled the concept is being embraced by some of the world’s largest companies including apple which says that it hopes to make all of its products using recycled materials and ford which is already building 3d printed car components out of what it calls waste powder as the late architect buckmunster fuller once said pollution is nothing but the
Resources we are not harvesting we allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value so if it’s such an important idea why aren’t there hundreds of startups trying to do this i think it is hard you know the other inputs are renewable electricity and water and so we are reliant on the growing impact and of renewable electricity on decarbonizing
Our grid right in order to you know really transform the co2 emissions earlier this month you had your first series a funding round i think you raised 57 million dollars where are you now in terms of like the proven technology so today in our lab we have a system that does kilograms per day transformation of carbon dioxide we want to go up to tons per day okay
So show me what we have here yeah this is the system that we use to deposit that catalyst and make a layer onto a polymer electrolyte membrane and then that’s what goes into our system to do the carbon dioxide transformer sorry is this an additive manufacturing type thing yeah similar but super small scale the layer that we’re depositing is much thinner how thin
Like are we talking about like hair length i can’t tell you exactly our core technology but thin this does look a lot like a 3d printer in terms of how it’s yeah we have a solution containing you know catalyst additives and then just a solvent that those other components are dispersed in and then that’s fed into these one of these nozzles and then forced down by
An air stream onto the substrate and the solvent dries and it leaves behind the solids but you can already see right we can coat really large areas right and so so it’s totally unclear to me as to what happens next so once you’ve got this coating then what ultimately we could put this into you know a cell that’s you know as big as this deposition area at scale
Is this machine is much much larger or do you have many of these machines i think it’s a different layout so more of a roll to a rural conveyor belt type of process right more continuous production this is a relatively small system to be honest like you can make this as big as your whole room or your whole facility i mean i think technology gives us options
And so we have choices and so we can choose to do something about climate change because we have technology like this right so we’re not doomed we might be doomed but you hope we’re not doomed yeah i don’t i don’t think we’re doomed i mean i think some of the beauty of this solution is that it doesn’t require you to be a believer in you know carbon dioxide being
An ill or not and causing climate change we aim to be cost competitive at scale and so there won’t be an economic cost to you know using these co2 made materials the other thing we should look at is the actual prototype this can transform kilograms per day you do have a prototype doing that yeah okay one of the advantages of these types of systems is that they
Are kind of like kind of just run on their own like you turn it on and it feels like a dishwasher it’s like a dishwasher literally um you don’t have to be tweaking things or tending things like every three months you have to replace a filter but it’s not like rocket science right i think anyone could could replace the filter so yeah the the next scale from here
Would be kind of a couple shipping containers worth of volume but probably not in a shipping container probably a skid um and it would look you know like a scaled-up version of this essentially but it’s a little bit like a chemicals plant but quiet operating at ambient temperature and you know no kind of smells or fumes or anything that you might like associate
With a typical chemicals plant right this almost looks like a caricature of like an actual thing mad scientist laugh or something right what are we looking at here kendra yeah so to develop our catalyst that transforms carbon dioxide we’ve done a lot of testing and optimization the stand is designed to allow us to control you know the input of carbon dioxide
Water electricity and then measure what’s the energy utilization that we’re getting out of the cell what’s the temperature what’s kind of the optimal operating conditions so are you sort of tweaking the inputs running the same process and seeing what the outputs are yeah so we’re iterating you know as rapidly as possible on you know the conditions the materials
And then also the cell hardware to really achieve the performance that we’re looking for this is an artificial treat okay so describe what an artificial tree is because the concept you know mind-boggling right i think a tree takes carbon dioxide from the air water from the ground and sunlight is the source of energy and it makes carbon dioxide into sugar our
Devices are similar because they take you know carbon dioxide and water from the inputs that we’re feeding to them plus energy in the form of electricity and then can transform that carbon dioxide into not sugar but you know other kind of intermediate products so this might be a silly question but like decades from now if like the brazilian rain forest is like
Continue to be reduced at the rate it’s been cut the last 30 years i mean i don’t want to in any way say like we can make up for that and that’s okay but is it just like more and more of these will end up doing the work like are we having more and more artificial trees in the absence of real ones i mean the energy has to come from somewhere so the energy here
Can come from the sun when we couple it to you know solar panels but i would say you know trees provide a lot more benefits than just co2 mitigation right i mean it’s a whole ecosystem this is obviously a piece of metal so i would not i would not trade a tree okay you’d prefer real trees i prefer you know we keep all the real trees and have these systems in addition to that
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How to build an artificial tree | FT Energy Source By Financial Times
