Featured Prime Mover: CarbonCapture CEO Adrian Corless

Prime Movers Lab spoke to CarbonCapture Inc. CEO Adrian Corless about building the world’s largest direct air capture project, the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, and how he stays focused on the important things every day. Here is the full interview:

Tell us a bit about your background?

I’m an engineer by training and by nature. I’ve always been fascinated by thermodynamics, complex energy systems, and climate-focused solutions. I spent the first part of my career as a technical leader in the hydrogen and fuel cell sector — I’m particularly proud of the commercial successes our team accomplished at Plug Power after it acquired my first startup.

The second part of my career has been focused on providing business and technical leadership in the atmospheric carbon removal space as CEO of both Carbon Engineering and now CarbonCapture Inc. I’m driven by the opportunity to have a positive impact on the existential threat we are all facing due to climate change.

CarbonCapture recently announced a five-megaton direct air capture and storage project in Wyoming called Project Bison. Can you share some more details about the initiative?

Project Bison is the first carbon removal project being developed by CarbonCapture. We’re taking advantage of the modular nature of our systems to develop the project in phases to mitigate technical and business risks at a modest scale as we ramp to megaton scale. We have great partners on this project, including our sequestration partner, Frontier Carbon Solutions, that are aligned with our mission to grow Project Bison into the largest DAC site in the world. Wyoming is a great place to deploy a project like Bison due to the excellent geology for sequestration and a very supportive political and business environment.

Why is direct air capture so important? Why can’t we just cut our way to our emissions goals?

It’s hard to overstate how hard it will be to get to net zero at a planetary scale. We’ll likely need to deploy a very wide variety of approaches to mitigate or eliminate emissions, but we are not going to get to net zero without a significant amount of carbon removals. It is really important for people to understand that carbon removal technologies like DAC are not a substitute for massive reductions in emissions. In fact, between now and 2030, the vast majority of reduction needs to come from emission reductions and mitigation. DAC and other methods of carbon removal come into play in a more significant way starting in the 2030s, but we need to start now.

What impact will the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act have on direct air capture?

The IRA will greatly accelerate the deployment of climate-relevant technologies, including DAC. In its current form, the 45Q provisions of the IRA include significant long-term, highly dependable financial support for DAC projects going out to 2044. This will allow much more capacity to be deployed much sooner — my rough estimate is that it will end up accelerating the development of the industry by a decade. In one fell swoop, the US became the best place in the world to deploy DAC projects.

In Prime Movers Lab’s Breakthrough Science Roadmap, we predicted that direct air capture (DAC) will cost less than $100 per tonne of CO2 captured by 2040. Do you think that is realistic?

Absolutely! CarbonCapture has adopted a “modular open systems architecture” that allows us to work with a number of developers of advanced CO2 capture materials. There’s a growing number of academic and commercial labs around the world specifically working on advanced DAC capture materials — on the front lines, we’re seeing very rapid progress being made in sorbent capacity, capture kinetics, and durability — which of course leads directly to large reductions in the net cost of CO2 capture. We have a clear roadmap to get to costs under $100/ton by 2040.

Who inspires you?

I have to say, it’s the young engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs that are committing themselves to solving legacy climate problems. They didn’t create the crisis, but they’re certainly going to fix it and create incredible opportunities for a whole new generation of companies.

Have you read anything lately that inspired you?

I’m currently reading pretty much anything from Sam Harris including “Waking Up” and his Making Sense podcasts. I’ve found that his practical messaging on meditation and world issues help me cut through the chaos and stay focused on what’s real and important in my life.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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