Prime Movers Lab Webinar Series: Carbon Capture
A conversation with industry experts on trends and technologies in the CO2 space
Why is now the right time to invest in carbon capture, or in clean energy in general? What opportunities exist today, and what challenges remain? We discussed these questions and more with founders and industry experts in our first Tech Webinar on Carbon Capture. We invite you to watch it here!
Our expert panelists: Bill Gross, Matt Lucas, and Volker Sick engaged with our Prime Movers Lab community on this important topic, making it accessible for a broad audience. Each brought a unique perspective and set of experiences:
- Bill Gross is the founder of Idealab (a technology incubator in Southern California) and of a company aptly called Carbon Capture to cost-effectively remove CO2 directly from the air. Prime Movers Lab is a proud investor in Carbon Capture, which supplies a critical missing piece to realizing Bill’s vision of a clean energy future that began with his companies Heliogen and Energy Vault.
- Matt Lucas is the Managing Director of Business Development at New Energy Risk. New Energy Risk facilitates first-of-a-kind project financings for clean energy and low-carbon technologies. Matt’s experience spans working with a number of University spinouts, Siemens Corporate VC, and raising $10mm for a CCUS startup accelerator.
- Volker Sick is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, and the Director of the Global CO2 Initiative. At the Global CO2 Initiative, he’s helping grow and promote technologies that can take CO2 and turn it into a profitable business. Contact them at info@globalco2initiative.org.
Here are a few examples of key points from the conversation:
At a high level, “Carbon Capture” means carbon dioxide (CO2) capture. Carbon can be a lot of things (like diamonds, pencils, graphene) but in this context we mean capturing the gas CO2. There are three main uses for captured CO2:
- In Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), CO2 is injected into oil wells to force more oil and gas out. While this is a large market for CO2, the profitability of the carbon capture project is then tied to commodity cycles. (Recent example: NRG’s Petra Nova Project)
- Convert CO2 into a valuable product. This creates an “Impact vs. Profitability” trade-off. The highest-profit markets for CO2 are small niche markets. To remove CO2 at the scale needed to mitigate climate change, CO2 needs to be used to make a product that is sold at high volumes, like cement or fuel.
- Sequester CO2 underground. While this is essentially a “non-product”, there are a growing number of approaches to monetize long-term CO2 sequestration. The most notable are the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) marketplace and the 45Q tax credit.
As several panelists pointed out, timing is everything (ie the “Why Now?!”). Several converging trends suggest now is the right time to invest in this area:
- Increasing awareness and public support is one factor, as is the investment cycle in clean energy and “greentech” (which is finally recovering from the crash around 2010).
- The falling cost and increasing availability of low cost, low carbon energy is a key enabler.
- While the price for captured CO2 today is still low (with some exceptions), a decade ago it was zero. Today’s CO2 pricing is driven by marketplaces and policy incentives, most notably the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard marketplace and the 45Q tax credit (see a great explanation of 45Q from Matt here). The cross-over point where CO2 capture becomes profitable is now in sight, within a reasonable fund horizon.
If you’d like to dive deeper, many of the topics we touched on in this webinar are covered in more detail in our Carbon Capture Research Briefing. This report contains sections covering carbon capture markets, sectors where CO2 is or can be captured, and descriptions of the technologies for both point-source CO2 capture and direct air capture (DAC). For a basic refresher for all in your household, check out Prime Movers Lab Kids Corner: Carbon Capture!
A final note- shortly into the webinar, Volker comments on the darkness outside the window behind me. Here is a picture of our street in Berkeley, CA at 10:30am, which would usually be broad daylight! (This webinar was partly recorded from the bright second-story window on the house to the left.) Wildfires from uncharacteristically hot, dry weather make both CO2 and “particulates” (ash) that block sunlight — this is a more real visualization then we see on most days of what CO2 in the air actually means!
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing.
