Resources

• This technical article describes the Carbon Engineering’s process for capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
• One of the uses for the carbon captured from air is liquid fuel – gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. This National Geographic article explains what’s behind this approach.
• Forbes describes Carbon Engineering’s receipt of $68 million in investment as “A Historic Inflection Point in Capitalism’s Battle Against Climate Change.”

Guests

Host: Rebekah Emanuel, Head of Social Entrepreneurship, Harvard Innovation Labs

Guest: Steve Oldham, CEO, Carbon Engineering

Transcript

Steve Oldham:
So we believe one of the mechanisms we need to address climate change is we need to be paying down the principal. We need to be putting CO2 back where it came from, underground. It didn't come from trees, it didn't come from the biosphere, it came from underground. To solve the problem, we got to put it back underground.

Rebekah Emanuel:
I'm Rebekah Emanuel, and this is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School. We explore the business implications and opportunities of climate change. This season of Climate Rising, we focus on entrepreneurship tackling climate change. I'm the Director of Social Entrepreneurship at Harvard Innovation Labs. I work with current and future entrepreneurs every day. Many of the entrepreneurs we've spoken with this season are launching technologies or business models that produce less carbon than the status quo approaches. Whether that's leather made from mushrooms instead of cows, or vehicles that run on electricity instead of fossil fuels. Other guests are finding new ways to finance those tech or business solutions.

Today, we're talking about something different. We're speaking with Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. Steve is tackling climate change by developing a technology that captures carbon that's already in the air. The potential benefits of this approach are huge. But as we'll hear, there's still quite a few hurdles to overcome. I started by asking him about how the technology works. And that meant picturing a bathtub.

Steve Oldham:
So when I first started at Carbon Engineering, it was this bathtub analogy that made me really recognize why we have to do Direct Air Capture. So let me try and explain that simply for you. So I think of the atmosphere as a bathtub. And we have the taps are running, the faucets are running, we are filling the bathtub with water, just as we're filling the atmosphere with CO2. And just as if that was the bathtub in your bathroom, you would get more and more concerned as the volume of water in the bathtub goes up and up and up. So what would you do in that case? Well, it's pretty obvious what you'd do. You would run over and you'd turn off the taps. And that's what we do when we think about reducing emissions, we turn off the tap, so that we're no longer putting more CO2 in the atmosphere, more water in the bathtub.

But here's the problem. This bathtub has billions of taps, and they're all flowing. Some of them are slowly reducing, some of them increasing. And the water in the bathtub is going up and up and up. And I don't think we can turn off every single one of those taps. So luckily, the bathtub industry figured out this problem early on. And what did they do about it, they put a plug in every bathtub. So if you couldn't turn off the taps in your bathroom, you just simply yank out the plug, and the water will go down. So can we have a plug in the atmosphere? Can we pull out water directly from the bathtub, just as we do in our houses here? And Direct Air Capture does that for you. It provides a plug that allows us to drag CO2 straight out of the atmosphere, and allows us to offset the fact that we might not be able to turn off every single tap.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Excellent. So I'll think about that next time I'm taking a bath. So you're the head of Carbon Engineering, can you just tell us a little bit more about Carbon Engineering's model for this Direct Air Capture plug in the bathtub? Maybe you just walk us through how it works.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. So to go back to kind of first principles, CO2 in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million today. And again, to give people a simple analogy, that's the equivalent of one drop of ink in a swimming pool. So removing CO2 from the atmosphere is actually technically quite challenging. And to do it at an affordable price point, is even more challenging. So what Carbon Engineering has done as a company over 11 years, we're 11 years old, has been to develop a technological solution for stripping CO2 from the atmosphere at very large scale, and at low cost. And by doing so, you're doing two things. You're offsetting an emission that's occurring somewhere else. Just the equivalent of having your tap running but with the plug out at the same time.

The second thing you're doing is you're building a tool that once we get to net zero, and once we stop emissions, we can eliminate yesterday's CO2, and the day before, and the day before that. And when you talk to the climate scientists, they'll tell you that we have about 800 gigatons of excess CO2 in the atmosphere, and we're making the problem worse by about 40 gigatons every year. So the ability to have this plug, this ability to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere is going to become absolutely critical.

Rebekah Emanuel:
What does it look like if I'm standing next to your machine?

Steve Oldham:
I guess the best way to think of it is, the first step of our process is essentially a large fan. And that fan runs, it pulls air into our machine, into our system. We then have a series of chemical reactions. We have a four-step process, and we use high school chemistry to extract CO2 through chemical reaction. And then once we've extracted the CO2, we remake our chemicals that did the absorbing in the first place. So this is a very critical part of developing a solution at large scale.

How do you get the cost down? You get the cost down by reusing the same material over and over again to capture CO2. One of our plants looks like a chemical plant. It's a pretty large scale. It's about 80 acres in size. One of our plants captures a megaton of atmospheric CO2 per year. That's the CO2 capturing the equivalent of about 14 million trees. These plants are large, look like industrial plants, but are completely clean.

Rebekah Emanuel:
And so you capture this carbon, and then where does it go?

Steve Oldham:
So two things fundamentally, you can either put the CO2 back underground. And when you do so, you create what we call a negative emission, because you're offsetting somebody else's positive emission. And when you think about climate change, our climate change problem has occurred because we took CO2 out of the ground and put it straight into the atmosphere. So to solve the problem, we need to do the opposite, take CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back underground again. So you can bury CO2 underground, it's safe, it's an established process, it's auditable, you can measure exactly how much CO2 you're putting underground. So that's option number one, put it back underground and offset emissions.

Option number two is to use CO2 as a product. So an example of that that we do at Carbon Engineering is we combine our CO2 with hydrogen, and we make a hydrocarbon. A hydrocarbon can be fossil fuels equivalent. So for example, kerosene, diesel, gasoline. Except when we make that fuel, we've removed its carbon footprint from the atmosphere in advance. So the fuel is essentially carbon neutral. And when you put fuel in a vehicle, and the fuel is carbon neutral, the vehicle became carbon neutral. So that's an example of how you can use atmospheric CO2 to reduce emissions here on the planet.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So you're either putting things down the bathtub drain, or you have a closed loop. Is that right?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. That's a great way to say it.

Rebekah Emanuel:
This all sounds a little energy intensive, and isn't using too much energy part of our problem?

Steve Oldham:
So there are things that you have to accept in solving this problem. And for sure, we use energy. But the atmosphere is everywhere. Air is everywhere. So we put our plants where renewable energy is available, but isn't used today. And there is a lot of places on the planet where that is the case. The first plant we're building is in the Permian Basin in the United States. It's in a relatively remote location. Nobody there demands electricity, but there is renewable electricity available. So yes, it's energy intensive, but we're using additional energy that, frankly, would not be used for any other purpose. We're building our own energy plants alongside our Direct Air Capture plants.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Bring me back to these trees. How do you compare what you're doing, so Carbon Engineering's technology, to other forms of carbon capture, other ways of taking carbon from the air and putting it in something?

Steve Oldham:
Sure. So let me start by being absolutely clear on something. We support all mechanisms and tools that can address the climate change problem. We're all parents, we all care about the future of our planet, we are supportive of every mechanism that reduces our carbon footprint. You asked about trees and I'm happy to talk about trees. Trees, of course, are a cheap way to start reducing CO2 emissions, but they're not permanent. That's the sad, unfortunate reality. So over about a 50-year period, an 80-acre forest of trees would capture about 4,000 tons of CO2. In the same time period, our plant would capture 15 million tons of CO2. We simply don't have the land area to plant enough trees to deal with the problem. We need that land area to feed ourselves. We have enough of a problem maintaining the current level of trees we have, let alone planting another 3 trillion trees to help address the climate change problem.

So we absolutely support tree planting. I'll give an analogy that may sound harsh, but it's accurate. Planting trees is like playing paying the interest on your mortgage, and telling your kids that they have to pay the principal. So sure, that's a way of which you can minimize the impact today, but you're just pushing the poem into the future. Trees die. And when they die, they return that CO2 to the atmosphere. So we believe one of the mechanisms we need to address climate change is we need to be paying down the principal. We need to be putting CO2 back where it came from, underground. It didn't come from trees, it didn't come from the biosphere, it came from underground. To solve the problem, we got to put it back underground.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Great. So let's talk about these dollars and cents since I like your mortgage metaphor here. Can you tell me what Carbon Engineering's model is from a business standpoint? How do you get money and from who?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. So the first thing I always say to people, and I say this to every investor who's approached us and put money into the company, if you don't believe that there is a cost to climate change, don't invest in our company, and our company will fail. There is, in my mind, a very clear cost to climate change. And if there is a cost to climate change, there is a value in preventing it. You and I will both take out house insurance, car insurance, across the planet, we take out insurance against multiple different eventualities. We are faced today with a similar problem. We need to spend money today to prevent the future impact of climate change. It's a choice. I hope it's a choice that we make correctly.

So our business absolutely depends on people recognizing that there is a value in eliminating carbon. So how that value is realized depends on policy. So in some jurisdictions, you have a carbon tax. In other jurisdictions, you have a carbon credit. You're starting to see companies and individuals personally spending money to eliminate their carbon footprint because their shareholders or their customers are demanding it. So we require a carbon price through one mechanism or another to drive our business. And when you think about electric cars, when you think about renewable electricity, we have policies in place that support those activities. We have tax credits for renewable electricity, we have incentives for people to buy electric cars, these are ways of paying a carbon price. So we require the same thing. There are some jurisdictions that already have those policies in place. And it's those policies that provide the economics to allow us to build a plant.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So I think a lot of people think about climate and finding solutions for climate change is really tricky. One thing that you said is that you think, actually, it's relatively simple from a policy standpoint. Can you tell me about that?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. So the beauty of direct air capture is it's a completely ubiquitous solution. It allows you to eliminate any emission from any place on the planet of any type, and also, by the way, from any moment in time. And no amount of biofuels, electric cars, renewable energy, none of those things have that same capability. So when you accept that you have the ability to pull the plug out, and you know the cost of pulling the plug out, the cost of eliminating emissions through direct air capture, now you have a baseline for what your worst case cost for eliminating the carbon footprint is.

So let's say for sake of argument that my cost to eliminate a ton of CO2 and put it permanently back on the ground is $100 per ton of CO2. So now you can establish a policy that basically says, if you can eliminate your footprint, industry, individual, country, for less than $100 a ton, go ahead and do so. And there are technologies that allow you to do so, for sure. In certain cases. If you can't or it's too expensive, pay the government $100 a ton and government will buy Direct Air Capture and eliminate the emission for you. So that one policy, you set the carbon price at the cost of Direct Air Capture, allows companies to innovate and find cheaper ways to do it, but it also guarantees that any emission is eliminated.

So think of aviation, what's the cost of eliminating emissions in aviation? It's huge. Columbia University just put out a study that said that the lowest cost is about $600 a ton to eliminate emissions, outsource in aviation. We're all going to invent electric planes to replace every plane in the world, all the airport infrastructure, all the fueling infrastructure, we're going to change all those things? Why? Why not instead, have the government build a DAC facility, Director Air Capture facility, the airline industry pays the $100 a ton, cheaper than 600 and the emission is eliminated.

Rebekah Emanuel:
And then you also talked a little bit about policies that right now are driving your business. Can you tell me a little bit about how that works now? So who do you sell to now? Who's buying captured carbon straight as it were?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. So a couple of policies in the United States that I would draw attention to that are very powerful and already exist and have been put together by very innovative people seeking to address climate change. So at the federal level, we have a tax credit. It's in the section 45Q of the US tax code. And 45Q pays $50 a ton for CO2 buried underground. So if you're a business that takes CO2 and buries it underground, you get a credit from the government on your tax of $50. And that's a good policy because many, many businesses pay tax and many, many businesses are keen to avoid paying more tax. So if they can find a way to eliminate or reduce their tax bill, then they will do so through this type of mechanism. So that's one mechanism, a tax credit of $50. It's too low to solve the problem, but it goes a long way towards encouraging interest.

Another example is the state of California has a low carbon fuel standard. And they're solving the problem a different way around. They're basically saying, you have to address the carbon footprint of the fuel that you use in California. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. So if you're selling fuel in California, the carbon intensity, carbon footprint of that fuel, has to reduce every single year up until 2030. So now make yourself the CEO of a company providing fuel to California. How do you reduce the carbon intensity of your fuel? If you use fossil fuel, you can't reduce its carbon intensity, it's 100% carbon intense. So you either buy credits from a company like ours, or you blend your fuel with a synthetic fuel.

Like for example, I add a fuel product that I talked about earlier on. And that way, you reduce the carbon intensity. So in California, they create a market for companies to find the cheapest solution to reduce their carbon footprint in fuel, and that brings innovative solutions to the table. So it's the combination of those two policies that leads to us building that first plant today. The sum total of those policies exceeds our cost and hence, we build a plant.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So in some ways, you're at the very cutting-edge of a market. It sounds like you're creating something that's hugely valuable in driving carbon out of the air, but there isn't yet a national or global agreement on the infrastructure yet.

Steve Oldham:
I guess the way that I think of it is our company is creating a tool. It's a very, very powerful tool. Our job is to demonstrate that it works. I like to say it's feasible, available and affordable. That's our job. We have the easy job in doing that.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Doesn't sound that easy.

Steve Oldham:
The hard job is the people who then choose to use that tool, and choose to make the compromises on their choice. What are we going to give up to spend the money on fixing climate change? Let me give you another example. COVID. So don't we all wish that two years ago, some scientists somewhere said I'm going to spend my time and come up with a vaccine for a new disease. And if we'd done that, that scientist would have produced that vaccine, governments would have it all ready to go, and we would have eliminated the pandemic that's so affecting us today.

Well, the really, really big pandemic that's coming is climate change. It will have a massive impact on everybody's way of life. We have a vaccine. We know the solution. So are we going to make the choice to spend the money to fix this problem in advance? Or are we going to stumble into the dramatic changes that the pandemic has caused and see the same with climate change?

Rebekah Emanuel:
So Steve, here's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing that you've got a tool that's incredibly valuable, and could help us fend off one of these huge coming waves of sort of pandemic equivalent with climate change. But the market isn't fully developed yet. And you are the CEO of a company and still need to make money now. And so you're selling both captured carbon straight and this air to fuel. Tell me a little bit about who's buying now. I heard that Shopify is buying and Areon is buying.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. So first, let me correct a perception. Regrettably, we're not making money today. We're still pre-revenue. We are starting to get customers though. And as you point out, those customers are very important for us. So where are they coming from and what they’re doing. So what I am beginning to see and it's really encouraging, is companies that are far thinking, either because they are socially responsible companies looking at what they can do for the planet, or because they are under pressure from shareholders, their customers, their employees to do something about climate change, they are starting to think ahead about what makes the most sense.

So some companies, and Shopify is a great example, let's talk about them for a minute. Shopify recognized that carbon removal is going to become essential. Direct Air Capture is therefore going to become essential, and they like what they see from Carbon Engineering. So they're starting with the end in mind. They're recognizing that ultimately, the planet's going to need this, so they want to support companies like ours, who were doing direct air capture and carbon removal today. So that in the future those technologies are available. You're seeing companies like Microsoft and Amazon announce climate funds with the same long term incentive in mind. When you talk to Amazon, what they say is they want to make investments today that will mean Direct Air Capture and similar technologies will be available at a lower price point in the future.

So this movement from the commercial sector is really encouraging, because we all know how long it takes for policies to come in at the government level. We all know what happens with governments, one day it's a left leaning government, couple of years later, it's a right leaning government. So you always have policy variation coming from government, whereas commercial companies can act today. And I'm also really encouraged by the work that Mark Carney and the United Nations are doing. Mark Carney is the UN Special Envoy for climate change. He was the former governor of the Bank of England. What he is driving for is for disclosure on public company records that shows the impact for those companies to get to net zero.

So it's very easy for a large energy company, a Shell or a BP to say I'm going to be carbon neutral in 2050. It's a lot harder for them to come up with the plan to get to net zero and show the financial impact. Those types of changes are going to drive more and more awareness and action in climate change. So that's why you see those forward-thinking leading companies starting to take action today.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So let me read back to what I heard about Amazon. So there's lots of technologies out there where the price originally was very high. But then when lots of people want it, the price drops. And then when the price drops, more people want it right. We saw that in solar, we see it in a range of things. Is that why Amazon's investing in carbon capture?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's a question you need to ask Amazon to get the definitive answer. But from my perspective, companies like Amazon and Microsoft are saying, we're going to need these technologies in the future to get to net zero. And we are in a jurisdiction in many cases that require us to get to net zero. So what can we do today to maximize the chance that these technologies will be fully available and low cost in the future so that we as companies can get to net zero? So what investments can we make? How can we help companies drive down their costs? We have a great relationship with Occidental in the oil and gas business. They've really helped us drive down our costs. They understand how to build large chemical plants, so we're working with them to reduce cost. We hope companies like Amazon and Microsoft will also work with us and find other ways we can reduce cost.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So tell me just a little bit more about your relationship with Occidental. It's not always the first thing that you think about to be partnering with oil majors as investors and as technical partners when you think about this business.

Steve Oldham:
So let me go back to the bathtub again. So we have a technology, which is a plug, pull it out, and the water from the bathtub, the CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to drain away. But what lies underneath the plug. So what lies underneath the plug is a plumbing infrastructure to take your water out of the bath, and away through a series of pipes and it's gone. So Occidental is one of the world's leading companies in dealing with CO2 and putting it underground. They know how to do it. They've been doing it for 50 years. So we can capture CO2. But I need a partner that knows what to do with it afterwards, safely and accountably and permanently. So that's what Occidental brings to the table. They bring the other part of the jigsaw. We capture, they remove.

Then you add the fact that they have a lot of knowledge, individuals with a lot of experience in large chemical plants in dealing with carbon dioxide. And this week, Occidental announced that they were the first US energy company that would be net zero. So I see a lot of intent to be a leading part of the energy transition in Occidental. They're a fantastic partner for us.

Rebekah Emanuel:
It's a big announcement.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah.

Rebekah Emanuel:
One of the other things, my understanding is that Occidental or others like them can do with what you've captured is actually to pump the carbon captured by Carbon Engineering into like an oil area of rocks to push the old the oil to the surface. And companies who are oil extractors like it because it helps extract oil from old difficult to exploit wells. My understanding is that Occidental is planning to do this at one of the new sites that they're helping develop via OnePointFive. Can you tell me about it and how this fits with your overall goals as a company?

Steve Oldham:
Sure, yeah. You asked earlier on, you said, how are you making money today, or intend to make money sooner rather than later, because we need to make money to be able to survive as a company and advance our technology. So the process you're talking about is called enhanced oil recovery. It's not fracking, just to be very clear for people on that. Enhanced oil recovery puts CO2 underground that dilutes the crude oil that is underneath the ground and allows more of it to be harvested. So when you use direct air capture, you put more CO2 underground from the atmosphere than is contained in the crude that comes out. So stop and think about that for a minute.

We just invented carbon neutral fossil fuel. We eliminated the carbon footprint. So enhanced oil recovery with atmospheric CO2 makes carbon neutral crude. And that is a way in which you can decarbonize in parallel with continuing to use those fossil fuels while you transition. And I think that's very powerful. Now, I get criticism for what I just said, because inevitably, there are some people who say we should stop using all fossil fuels today. My assertion is, I don't think that's feasible. I think that's a tap we can't turn off, to go back to my bathtub analogy.

Rebekah Emanuel:
We got a squeaky tap in the bathtub.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. One of those taps just keeps dripping. There's nothing you can do about it. So I think over time, we will be able to do something about it, just not immediately. So let's decarbonize in parallel. And that's why enhanced oil recovery with atmospheric CO2 I think fits. And then the last thing I'll say, Rebekah, is of course, it helps us because it allows us to get our technology to market quicker. And the more plants we build, the sooner we build them, the lower our costs go, the wider the adoption of this technology becomes, and the greater impact we have on climate change.

Rebekah Emanuel:
You've got to get that flywheel going to allow more-

Steve Oldham:
You absolutely do. Yes.

Rebekah Emanuel:
One question about that. Are you at all worried about the moral hazard of people reaching out to turn the tap off in the bathtub, and then feeling like, this tap is just so convenient. I don't want to turn it off. Guess what, we've got this plug.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. I get that question a lot. I think it does a bit of a disservice to people and a lot of companies as well. I mean, there's always bad apples and bad actors in any population. Again, I think another analogy, you'll find that I’m full of analogies. Another example would be I could take my trash out every single night and empty it on the street in some quiet place. And I know that somebody will come along and pick it up. But I don't do that. I deal with my trash responsibly. I minimize my trash. I recycle it as much as I can. I don't do the stupid thing. The awareness of climate change is growing and growing and growing. And it is becoming part of the social and corporate responsibility of not just companies, but individuals. I think that will continue to grow no matter what. And to think because we have a tool that can clean up CO2 that people won't be bothered about their CO2 footprint, I just don't see it.

Rebekah Emanuel:
I think the neighbors will squint disapprovingly.

Steve Oldham:
Yes. The neighbors will, the customers will, the shareholders will. You've seen that today. Look at the investment funds that are taking money away from industries that have a high carbon footprint. I think this is going to become, I don't know, I'll pick on ... Let me choose one that's obviously wrong, drunk driving. It used to be socially, I won't say acceptable, but nobody really raised the red flag. Now, it's utterly and completely socially unacceptable. And I think carbon footprints will go the same way. It's already starting.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So let's project out into that future. How do you see the carbon capture space evolving in the next five or 10 years? How do you see your company evolving?

Steve Oldham:
So I'll go back to one thing I said earlier on. We very strongly believe that a whole suite of solutions are needed for addressing climate change. Direct air capture is not a magic bullet. I'm not proposing for a second that direct air capture is the single solution. But direct capture does very well in addressing those hard to decarbonize sectors that cost a lot more, or those taps, those sectors that are just too difficult to deal with today and need more time. So what I hope is that the world recognizes that carbon removal, removing the CO2 molecule from the atmosphere is as valuable as stopping the CO2 molecule going up in the first place. I like to say that one plus minus one is also zero. There's two ways to get to net zero.

And we recognize that having that backstop, having that infrastructure that allows us to eliminate any emission, no matter how difficult it was to stop, is going to become essential. And people recognize that we need to allocate a percentage of our carbon budget to direct air capture. Then we keep doing renewable electricity, we keep doing electric cars, we keep doing all the good things that we're doing as a society to remove our footprint and reduce it, but we are actively working on direct air capture, because we know there's going to be some taps we can't turn off. And we need to start that today. So I would like to see policy, interest, support, government action around building that infrastructure, and starting to do so today so we get the cost down in the future.

You mentioned, sorry, Rebekah, one more thing, you mentioned solar earlier on, and solar is a great example. The cost of solar have come down a lot. Imagine if we put a lot of money into solar 10 years earlier, then the cost would have reduced faster and the renewable energy usage today would be higher, because the cost would have come down sooner, and our carbon footprint will be lower. So starting early, reducing the cost of direct air capture, because we will reduce it further, gives you a tool and the capability that is going to be needed. So start today.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So let's just talk about how you're doing that. You've set up and developed all this technology, and then you made an interesting choice. You decided to license it out to plant partners rather than doing it all yourself. Can you tell me why?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. I mean, it comes down to just the sheer colossal size of the carbon problem. Now, we could never build enough plants ourselves to deal with this problem. So just as our technology is focused on large scale and scalability, our business plan needs to have the same focus. So by licensing that technology, hopefully to many, many different companies and governments worldwide, in parallel all of those licensures are building our plants. We focus on improving our technology, we don't get distracted by buying the land in a particular location or constructing the plant. We just focus on continually improving the efficiency and cost of our technology and our partners are building plants worldwide. That way-

Rebekah Emanuel:
So you're making it cheaper and cheaper the way solar did, and someone else is figuring out all the rooftops for your plants. So to speak.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. Because a guy who understands how to build a plant in China, that's a different skill set than the guy who understands how to build one in, I don't know, in Texas or Colorado or here in Canada. So let the experts do that. We'll focus on what we really do best.

Rebekah Emanuel:
And you do have licenses with folks in the US and the UK? Is that correct?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. In the United States, we're partnered with a company called OnePointFive, after the 1.5 degree requirements that the scientists have put on us. OnePointFive is a combination of Occidental, superb partner for us. And a company called Rusheen that has been in the renewable energy and low carbon business for many years, a financial entity. In the United Kingdom, we're working with Pale Blue Dot. They are working on a carbon capture plant in Northern Scotland with sequestering CO2 in the North Sea. When you think about where you're going to put the CO2, one of the ironies, and you touched on it a little bit earlier on, one of the ironies is the very best places to put CO2 are the holes in the ground you've created with our extractive industries.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So wherever oil had taken it out?

Steve Oldham:
Yeah. Pretty much. Pretty much you created a hole in the ground. I mean, I'm being simplistic, there's obviously a little bit more nuance to it than that. But think of it very simply that way. That means the opportunity for countries like the United States, Canada, the Middle East, the North Sea, those areas have a huge opportunity in building an industry to address carbon sequestration.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So you're saying jobs that are going away or decreasing because those oil wells have dried up, potentially have a new set of jobs that could come to them?

Steve Oldham:
That's the mindset change that when the politicians get it, that's going to very interesting, because absolutely, those same ... And it's not just the areas, it's the skill sets, the individual-

Rebekah Emanuel:
The actual people.

Steve Oldham:
Actual people who understand how to build extractive industries are the same people who will have the skills, who understand build plants that put stuff back underground again. So there's an irony in that, of course, and some people will say we can't reward the people who created the climate problem. I think that's a little harsh. We created the climate problem, you and I, and our parents, and everybody else we know. We're the customers of electricity and energy. So we're just as responsible. So for me when I had the opportunity to move to Carbon Engineering, the company was looking for somebody who could help get their technology into the world. They had this fantastic widget, but how do you get adoption of that?

All those questions you asked me earlier on about how do you generate a market? How do you get public interest and policy support? How do you find the partners that can fill all the missing pieces in? We were a 20-person company when I took over Carbon Engineering, and we're trying to try to build a tool that can help save the world. So it's really hard to get that message out there when you're a 20-person company. So that's what the company was trying to find. And in my career, I'd spent time and energy on taking complicated technology, which isn't cheap, and trying to bring it to the commercial world, which is a combination of working with government and commercial companies. So that's why they were after somebody like me. For me, I have to tell you, it was a 10-second decision.

Rebekah Emanuel:
That's not very long.

Steve Oldham:
Yeah, I know. I know. But the mission of the company, I think is so important. I have kids. I'm very aware of the danger and impact of climate change. And to be able to play a role in doing something to help fix it, that is just a complete no-brainer. So yeah, I was delighted.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Steve, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us today here on Climate Rising.

Steve Oldham:
It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your interest and I hope your listeners go out into the world and take a very thoughtful and constructive approach to addressing climate change. We have to do it.

Rebekah Emanuel:
That's it for this episode of Climate Rising and for season three of the show. Thanks for joining us. I'm your host, Rebekah Emanuel. Climate Rising is produced by the Business & Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School. This episode was created with the help of associate producer, Micah MacFarlane, HBS class of 2020 and producer, Mary Dooe. Thanks as always to the team from the HBS Business & Environment Initiative that created and supported the podcast, Mike Toffel, Jennifer Nash, Lynn Schenk, and Elise Clarkson. You can subscribe to Climate Rising on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Please leave us a review. We appreciate the feedback. You can also find show notes and links to resources discussed on this episode on the Climate Rising homepage, climaterising.hbs.edu.