ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher

According to the 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world needs to cut carbon emissions drastically to avoid the worst effects of global warming. But that’s not all. In addition to reducing emissions, we also need to remove 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year by 2050. This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and CEO of Climeworks. They discuss how Jan and his team built the world’s largest direct air capture facility, which filters carbon dioxide from the air and stores it permanently underground. Plus, Jan’s optimistic vision of how humans can achieve the goal of reversing climate change. This episode was produced by Chris Maccini, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  So there's been a lot of extreme weather making headlines this winter and spring. Where I live, in California, we got hit with back-to-back-to-back-to-back endless atmospheric rivers, causing flooding, mudslides, record snowfall. Meanwhile, there were ice storms in Texas, tornadoes across the Midwest. And it's been so dry in Italy that some of the famous canals in Venice have begun to dry out. The United Nations has said that climate change is supercharging these types of extreme weather events, making them more common and more powerful. And so, in light of all these things happening, we thought it would be a good time to bring you my conversation from the spring of 2022 with Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder of Climeworks. Climeworks is a Swiss company that's building the world's largest

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  direct air capture and storage facilities using technology that pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it permanently underground. It's an incredibly daunting challenge, but Jan is hopeful that his company can be part of a larger solution. That might be able to help humanity combat climate change. All right, here's the show.

• 6:22Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So, most everyone has heard the grim predictions about climate change, that in order to keep our planet from warming more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, we have to reduce carbon emissions by more than half. And we have to do that by 2050. But that's not all. And I'm not trying to depress you here, but it won't be enough to just cut our global carbon emissions in half. Just to keep our planet from getting unsustainably warm over the next 50 years, we also have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So, to be clear, not only do we have to stop producing it, we also have to suck it out of the air.

• 7:07Guy Raz?

  In fact, we have to suck a lot of it out of the air. The IPCC, the United Nations group that represents the scientific consensus on this stuff, says that by 2050, we need to remove 10 billion tons of carbon from Earth's atmosphere each year. This is a huge monumental task. The good news is, the technology to do this exists. It's pretty straightforward. Imagine a shipping container outfitted with a bunch of large fans. Each fan essentially sucks in air, filters that air, removes the carbon, blows out carbon-free air, and then injects the carbon into rocks about a mile deep underground.

• 7:52Guy Raz?

  The bad news is, with our current technology, you need about 10 million of these shipping containers deployed all over the Earth to remove 10 billion tons of carbon a year. And the cost, at least right now, is so high that it makes this goal seem daunting. But a few enterprising entrepreneurs are actually undaunted. One of them is a German engineer named Jan Wurzbacher. Jan and Christoph Giebold co-founded a company called Climeworks, which has already built carbon capture facilities, including the biggest one on the planet in Iceland. They call it the Orca Plant. Right now, the Orca facility only removes about 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  from the atmosphere each year. That's a drop in the bucket, but Jan believes this technology will scale very fast. In fact, he believes that within 30 years, the carbon capture industry will be among the biggest in the world. Jan Berzbacher, welcome to the show.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Hey, Guy. Great to be here.

• 8:54Guy Raz?

  All right. So Jan, first of all, tell me a little bit about your background. I know you studied to be a mechanical engineer, right? Initially, right?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  That's right. That's correct. I actually came to Zurich back in 2003. Personally, I'm originally from Hamburg in Germany, but now almost 19 years ago moved to Zurich. I wanted to study here at ETH Zurich, the main technical university. And, well, that was thought to be for three years or five years at first, but then, as it happened, really at the first day, when you're introduced to the university, then we were organized in small groups of students to get a tour through the university. And I happened to be in the same group as Christoph was, and the two of us became friends

• 9:45Speaker 01

  very quickly, really, in the first days, and both had the dream of founding a company. And, well, then, it happened just six years later.

• 9:54Guy Raz?

  So the two of you, you and Christoph Gabel, went to study mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:02Guy Raz?

  In Zurich. And you both had the intention of maybe one day, starting a business. Tell me, at that time, what you thought you might want to do with your life?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. Probably, we didn't have that many thoughts. It's rather this dream of building up something by your own. I mean, I was always interested in solving hard, technical problems. That's maybe one ingredient from my end. And... On the other hand, I, you know, when I was in school, I organized parties and I did some stuff here and there. And I always thought like I'm doing something, building up something, that that was always something I was intrigued by. And Kristoff, pretty much the same. So it was really when we met and we asked each other, hey, what do you want to do one day? We didn't, we didn't know about direct air capture or, of course, we knew about the climate topic and climate change,

• 10:54Speaker 01

  but it was not at a level of attention where it is today, back in those days. So we had really just this dream, hey, one day we found a company. And that that was something that that drove us through the studies somehow. So we always like, if we were at a student party, we would high five and say, hey, we found a company one day, right? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. And then, yeah, then, so that was kind of the beginning.

• 11:16Guy Raz?

  All right. So you and Kristoff are friends and in this mechanical engineering program. And how did you start to kind of learn about this idea of direct air capture, which we're going to talk about in a sec, but tell me how this idea even developed?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So it was not us who had this idea for the first time. There was actually a project at the Swiss Institute of Technology. It was a project at the professorship of renewable energy carriers by Professor Steinfeld. And he is a researcher who's been working for the past 20 years or more than that on solar fuels or solar materials. So he developed solar driven reactors that could produce renewable hydrocarbons. So basically turn concentrated sunlight into something valuable. And he, like a couple of years before we started, he had this idea and he said, hey, if we want to do that at large scale, we need a closed cycle. So we need to take CO2 out of the air.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  We can then combine it with sunlight and water and make, say, renewable jet fuel out of that. Then the jet fuel is burned, the CO2 is emitted again to the atmosphere, and then you have to recapture it from the air. So you have to like turn it around in a cycle. That's, that's what can be done really long term, sustainable. And then, so there was this idea, there was a project on that, totally different technology. When we started, it was kind of the job of coming up with a different technology, which is more efficient, which is more scalable. So really, when we started, it was like, I remember the first days after we had incorporated Climeworks, like, the first thing I did is really sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and writing down pure numbers, like, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations, estimations, what can we do, what cannot we do.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I can give you an example, like, to take a ton of CO2 out of ambient air, you need to filter around 2 million cubic meters of air.

• 13:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  One out of 2,500 molecules in the air is CO2, only one out of 2,500. So imagine, I don't know, you walk on the Broadway or whatever, and imagine you need to pass 2,500 people until you find one person that you're looking for. And then you continue walking, you need to pass another 2,500 people until you find one person. So that's literally what a CO2 capture system does. So you need to filter a lot of air to take, like, a significant tonnage of CO2 out of the air.

• 13:48Guy Raz?

  All right. We know that there has to be a vast reduction in carbon emissions in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:58Guy Raz?

  But it's not enough. I think people don't, most of us don't understand that it's not enough to just stop burning carbon, right? And I think the reduction, it has to be something like 45% reduction by 2030 alone.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:12Guy Raz?

  And on top of that, we also need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Like, I think the UN's report, the latest IPCC report, says something like, by the middle of this century, so 2050, we have to remove 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year, in addition to reducing emissions, which seems like a massive, enormous, daunting task. So let's understand what has to happen here on the carbon capture side. Basically, we need to have giant

• 14:52Guy Raz?

  Turbine engine fans all over the world just sucking in air and filtering out carbon?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, first of all, you're making exactly the right point, Guy. You said it, you said additionally, and that's a very important point. Like, when we started Climeworks, many people asked us, hey, is that really what we need to do today? So why are you bothering capturing CO2 out of the air while there are still so many coal power plants and so many cars and planes driving and flying around and producing CO2? Should we not stop first all of these? And the answer to that is, we could have asked that question maybe two, three decades ago. Then this would still have been possible, but it's just too late. Like, it's too late to ask that question. So the only chance of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement is being bold on both ends.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  So again, the major portion has to come from reduction of emissions, from switching to renewables. But then to address these 10 billion tons of CO2 that need to be removed, we don't have a big portfolio of things to do. So you asked, what does that mean? Does that mean we have like huge giant turbines all over the world? Well, there are a few things we can do. We can, very simply speaking, plant trees. They takes CO2 out of the air.

• 16:07Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  However, they have some issues attached to them. So first of all, it's good. We should plant as many trees as possible. And by the way, we should avoid burning down trees and deforesting trees in the first place and then plant more. But, or and, let's not say but, and trees need a lot of area and they are not necessarily there forever. They might burn down, the land might degrade, they might not be growing for the next thousands of years. So that CO2 that is stored in trees is not necessarily bound for thousands of years. And very simply speaking, if we just do the calculation, what about capturing these 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air just by planting trees or doing similar biological methods?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Then you'll end up with huge areas that you need to fill with new trees. It's like you need something like the area of whole Europe or twice the area of India. And that's very likely not feasible. I mean, right now, we are entering a food crisis, very likely, if we look what's happening on the world markets. So typically, the area we have at our disposal for planting anything, we need it rather for food production. So that's then where technical solutions come in, such as Climeworks, as we are doing. If you build machines like we are doing, you can do it on much, much less area. So you are about a thousand times more area efficient. So at the same area where you can take one ton out of the air with trees,

• 17:33Speaker 01

  you could take a thousand tons out of the air with machinery. So that's important. You need substantially less area. You need energy. So you need, for example, solar or wind or geothermal, like you would want to use typically renewable energy. So that's the thing. So you can scale technology-based solutions for direct air capture to a scale of 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air. That's possible. So it'll probably, it'll not be one technology. It'll be not one solution. We need a lot of things to do it. But technological or like scaling up such direct air capture or similar solutions will have to carry a major part of these 10 billion tons. Otherwise, it's just not going to happen.

• 18:16Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you decide that you are going to build a company around capturing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is not a simple business proposition. You need a lot of money to do this kind of work. Just put aside the science part of it. Let's talk about the business part of it. And once you sort of proved this concept out, how did you go about building and getting financing to start to build these commercial-scale direct air capture plants?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  No, definitely, that was a big challenge. In particular, given the fact that when we started 2009, 2010, 11, what we were proposing was not generally accepted. Like, people were even fighting us. There were professors writing articles saying you should not invest in direct air capture. Because it's a waste of resources, we should focus on getting getting our coal power plants off the grid, just just to give an example.

• 19:17Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Like the the world was probably not ready to accept that it was too late just to stop burning coal.

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And that is something that has fundamentally changed over the past, say, five years or so. But when we started, we weren't there yet. So you said, how how did we start? We started actually looking for niche applications. So we did something totally different. Our first plant we built here in Switzerland, and that is taking it, that's still in operation, that is taking CO2 out of the air to then sell the CO2 to a greenhouse. They are fertilizing their plants with CO2 and also to Coca-Cola, who are making sparkling drinks with it.

• 19:54Guy Raz?

  So anyone who's got like a like a soda stream at home basically knows knows no sort of version of this is.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:00Guy Raz?

  Because it's basically a cartridge of CO2 that you put in your soda stream to to make bubbly water. So you this is really interesting. I mean, so you were basically initially, just to kind of see if there was a market for this product, which is captured CO2, you're selling it to Coca-Cola and presumably that is not sustainable. I mean, you we're we're not drinking enough Coca-Cola or any carbonated beverage to account for all of the carbon in the atmosphere, right? It's not enough. It's it's it's just kind of a, I guess, an initial step to show that what you could do with this.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, in terms of climate effects, that market is totally irrelevant. Like, is that is that a market? Could you grow a sustainable business on that? Yes, sure. So you we we could have decided just to become a a a small, medium-sized company, developing direct air capture plants and building them around the world to supply beverage factories. That that could have been an option, but that was not what we were interested in.

• 20:58Guy Raz?

  You would have had zero impact on the climate.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, and and and just keep in mind, like, when you drink your Coke, right, the CO2 comes out again. So it's not it's not a permanent storage of the CO2.

• 21:08Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  So those first plants, they were not meant to reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. It was just an initial market. That we were tapping into to scale our technology.

• 21:19Guy Raz?

  I guess when you burp after you drink your Coca-Cola, it's going right back into the atmosphere.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  That's exactly how it works.

• 21:24Guy Raz?

  All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna hear more from Jan Wirtzberger and what he has built and what he's building with Climeworks and carbon capture technology. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Back in a moment.

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• 25:18Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I am talking with Jan Wurzbacher. He's the co-founder and CEO of Climeworks, a company that is creating direct air carbon capture technology. Okay, let's talk about the technology now, sort of the kind of the next phase of this, which is somewhat different than removing carbon and then selling it to Coca-Cola and the agricultural industry to use. It's about injecting it deep underground.

• 25:47Guy Raz?

  And permanently storing it. Tell me how that work. How does it basically, how does it work?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  So start with the first part. A Climeworks direct air capture plant. So we have our modular containers that we call CO2 collectors, and they contain a filter material.

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  You can imagine that as a, as kind of a sponge, like a sponge likes water and would suck up water.

• 26:09Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And this filter material is similar like a sponge. It has a high surface area. It is very porous and, and it just reacts with CO2 when, when CO2 molecules pass by. So we have this filter inside the containers. And then in the first step of our filtering process, we just turn on the fans that are at the side of the filter box. We pull air through the filter. That takes about one to two hours, after which the material is full. It's saturated with CO2. Then we close the lids of these filter boxes. We heat them up to around 100 degrees Celsius. And that's 200 something Fahrenheit. It's like boiling water temperature.

• 26:50Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  We don't need high temperature. We don't need fancy stuff to do it. Just like heat it up a little bit. You can even do that with, with solar heat. And by that temperature increase, the CO2 is released again from the surface of the filter material. And you can turn on a pump that is then sucking out basically the pure concentrated CO2 from the filters. You can then hand it over to injection. And that's what we do in Iceland with our partners from Karpix. They have developed this, this method where they inject the CO2 in underground porous rocks where the CO2 is mineralizing with the rocks. So within two years, the CO2 is just turned into stone there. And then on the other hand, our filter will just start again from the beginning.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  So we'll cool it down, expose it to the next portion of airflow. We'll capture more CO2. And then you, this can go on for years. After like a couple of years, you have to replace the filter then.

• 27:43Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you and your co-founder Kristoff decide that it's not enough to just, you know, sell this, the CO2 to Coca-Cola. Tell me what the next step was. I mean, you, first of all, To build these plants on a large scale, even on a small scale, you need hundreds of millions of dollars, right?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It's capital intensive. We are building hardware. We're putting tons of concrete and steel in the ground to start capturing CO2. And well, that's why we have just closed our financing round number six in the history of the company, just in April 2022.

• 28:21Guy Raz?

  And what was the amount that you raised?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  That was 650 million US.

• 28:26Guy Raz?

  Wow. And it's really, because you have to build these massive facilities to just begin to suck in air, right?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right. And I mean, for us as a company, that's a large amount. That's much more funding than we had available before. The previous financing round, that was at around 100 million. But if you look at it from the other side, if you look at what this world needs to invest into corresponding infrastructure, into such types of technology, that's still a tiny sum, right? We need to invest, as you said, we need to invest billions, tens of billions, and hundreds of billions. And that's what we see on the horizon now. So governments start understanding what is needed. There are programs, like the Department of Energy is starting to promote those type of technologies. They are creating funding programs to increase the speed of scaling.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Think of it as the very, very early phases of the solar PV and wind industries, where you had the first prototypes out there. And they're also massive programs helped scaling that up. And that was a great success story, right? Today, solar PV is the cheapest method on earth to create electricity. How great is that? And it didn't take that long. And like the initial expectations on how this technology could first scale and second, reduce costs, they were like outperformed massively. Like 10 years ago, you would have been called crazy if you had predicted a solar PV plant producing solar electricity at five cents per kilowatt hour. Today, they're doing it at one cent. So that's massive. And that's the same what has to happen in our industry.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And I'm sure that will happen over the next two decades to come.

• 30:04Guy Raz?

  All right, Jan, let's just talk for a moment about just the challenge of doing this, right? Because we're talking about 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon needs to be removed from the earth's atmosphere. Every year by 2050, right now, how much carbon is being removed from the from the Earth's atmosphere every year through this technology?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Well, right now, as we speak, Kleimberg's, we have the largest operating plant running. That's our Orca plant in Iceland. We're speaking of thousands of tons per year. So it's a small scale. So we need to thousandfold that to get to millions of tons. And like this, this industry is set up to scaling up to the million tons per year scale in the next couple of years towards the end of this decade. So that's, that's what will happen. We are doing that, like a handful of other companies are working towards that. So that's, that's happening. Then the next question is, how can we scale up from millions of tons to billions of tons? If you look at what, what other industries have done, again, referring to solar PV

• 31:10Speaker 01

  or the wind industry, they did something like 10x every 10 years. If we can do the same, maybe we can do twice as fast as them. Then it is feasible that we can scale to the billions of tons per year scale by mid of the century, so by 2050. And that's where we need to go. So other industries have shown that you can do that. It's not impossible. And also in terms of, in terms of size, maybe, maybe let me give you one example, just that you have like something to imagine in terms of

• 31:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  What does it mean in terms of equipment that you need to put around on the, to put on Earth? Our plants are built out of modular systems. We call them CO2 collectors, and then one CO2 collector has the form of a 40-foot shipping container. So how many containers would you need to take 1% out of global emissions? So the climate science tells us by, by mid of this century, we need to take 10%, 20% out of the emissions out of the air. So let's take 1% of that. And you would need something like 750,000 containers for that, which, is that a large number? It's actually not a large number.

• 32:15Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  It's actually what goes through Shanghai port in two weeks, right? It's like, it's not a lot compared to global economy.

• 32:21Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And that's 1% and then you can 10-fold it, then you have 10% and then you're nearly there.

• 32:25Guy Raz?

  Okay. But let me ask you about this, because, and again, I'm, I am rooting for you. We all are. We want this to work. But I mean, I'm imagining like, we need to be like covering the deserts of the Western United States. Like, we need these containers deployed in a massive, scaled way, like, now.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  As soon as possible, that's right. In terms of the area that we need to cover, it's not that bad. If you think of all the area that is covered for open pit mining of lignin or coal, that's even much worse. So, I mean, energy infrastructure is large in any case. So that infrastructure will also be large, but not larger than other infrastructure. So in terms of speed of scaling, in terms of required financing, in terms of required area, and in terms of industry output of the world, that those are all numbers where you can show it's feasible to scale up. But it's big. It's a big job we have to do. It's a certain portion of the global economy output that needs to go in there.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  But it's just like, in the end, like, you know what we are talking is the creation of a new industry of the size of today's oil and gas industry. That's basically it.

• 33:37Guy Raz?

  You just, you chose such a complex business to get involved with, and I commend you for that, because it's just challenge after challenge. So, we're talking about like, the challenge of scale, the challenge of financing that scale. But there's the other challenge that we haven't talked about, which is, right now, with few exceptions, it's very energy intensive to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You need energy to remove it. And so, right now, in order to make this sustainable, you'd have to use renewable energy. Like, in addition to putting these modular shipping containers of, full of turbine fans all over the world, you need to deploy like, wind and solar farms next to them to power them.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Totally right. It's at the same time an energy challenge. The good news is, there is way enough energy arriving on this planet every minute from the sun in terms of solar energy, wind energy. So in terms of availability of renewable energy capacity, that's like, not an issue at all. But it's like, when you think of building up this infrastructure, you really need to do both. So you need to build The direct air capture plans and at the same time you need to build our renewable energy producing capacity, which on the other hand, however, can also be a good thing if you build direct air capture plans, let's say in regions where there is not a good electricity supply, no good electricity grids, there can be good synergies, right? You can support local communities by the same solar PV fields and wind farms that

• 35:04Speaker 01

  are built up to deploy direct air capture, but you need to do both. Yeah. The good thing is, since we're doing direct air capture, we are very flexible in terms of location. So air is everywhere. So we have our CO2 source everywhere. We are really looking to where is the best place to source sufficient renewable energy. And then the second question is, where can we store the CO2? Fortunately, there are many, many regions around the world where you can do safe and permanent CO2 storage in saline aquifers, in the Zaldrock, as we do it in Iceland, which is the best way to do it because the CO2 is just mineralized and turned into stone. So that's the great way to do it. But there are many other ways. So we are basically, what we're doing is mapping the

• 35:46Speaker 01

  world for renewable energy potential and storage potential. And where the two intersect, those are the sweet spots for large scale deployment of direct air capture.

• 35:56Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back in just a moment with more from Jan Berchbacher, co-founder of Climeworks. Stick around, you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 37:45Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. I'm talking with Jan Verspacher. He's the co-founder and CEO of Climeworks. It's a company that's working to develop and deploy carbon capture technology. All right, so you built, and I think it debuted just recently, in last year, a plant in Iceland called Orca. And presumably, you built it in Iceland, because Iceland is basically geothermally powered. I mean, most of their energy comes from geothermal power. And so I'm assuming that this plant in Iceland doesn't require fossil fuels.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  That's right. So Iceland is the sweet spot of starting to do what we're doing. You have geothermal heat and electricity to power our plant, and we do have the developed storage sites and storage reservoirs where we can inject the CO2 underground where it is then mineralized. It's really those two factors.

• 38:43Guy Raz?

  So this facility in Iceland, how many containers does it have?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Everyone has eight containers. So that ends up then with a total nominal capacity of 4,000 tons of CO2 per year that can be captured.

• 38:54Guy Raz?

  And it's exciting, but really, it's designed to prove the concept, to show what is possible.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  It's both. For us, it's exactly to prove the concept. Of course, we learn a lot from that. Like, based on that, we are now building a 10x larger plant. We take, of course, all the learnings. But at the same time, it's also the first commercial plant. So we are providing CO2 removal services with that plant to our corporate and private customers as well.

• 39:19Guy Raz?

  All right, explain this, because I'm assuming it's like, basically, companies that are just are paying you to offset their carbon emissions? This is, it's like when you buy a plane ticket, you have the option to spend some money to offset your emissions, and then might plant some trees or something. Is that essentially the same principle happening on a larger scale? Because I know there are big companies like Microsoft and Audi and Shopify and that are, are they essentially saying, look, we want to do our part. We're going to pay you X number of dollars in order to offset our emissions.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yes, that's very similar. So it's really the pioneering ones among the large corporates who have come up with very ambitious, like either net zero or even net negative goals of becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative. And those companies who are our customers are typically the ones who have had a very sophisticated look at the market and looked at what is available. And like Microsoft has done a great deal of work there and then they employed a bunch of scientists to look at the different ways and they turn out with the understanding that what we are doing at Climeworks is really what they believe is ultimately scalable. And that's why they are using our service. As you said, they pay us to remove a certain amount of tonnage of CO2 from the atmosphere

• 40:36Speaker 01

  and then put it on the ground for them in a really, really long-term, permanent way. Right? So it's fully additional. So it's not, it's not some certificates from some project that might have happened anyway. So it's additional. It's permanent and it's safe. And those are the attributes that are so important to them.

• 40:56Guy Raz?

  Well, here's what I'm trying to understand because what do they get out of it? Aside from doing their part for the planet, which they should, but really what do they get out of it? I mean, aside from being able to say, hey, look, we're actually doing this voluntarily because there's no requirement. They don't have to do it.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Well, not yet, first of all. So they are all anticipating that things will come up and they are already showing up on the horizon. But on top of that, it can be a very vital element of their business for a simple fact because their customers and their stakeholders might just ask them to do it. So those companies who are currently our customers, they know that they, if they can provide CO2 neutral or CO2 negative products to their customers and in particular achieve with a technology that is really bulletproof such as we are providing. That that has like hard economic benefits on their business model. And then we spoke about corporates a lot. Important is that that we are also serving serving just private individuals.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  So when we started this, actually, in two thousand sixteen seventeen, like a lot of people asked us, hey, like, it's cool what you're doing at Climeworks. You're taking CO2 out of the air. What what can we do to to to help? And and that's then when we decided, like, after being an engineering company, a hardware company for many years, which which we still are, for the first time, we introduced the digital business model. And and we opened a webshop, which is which is active today. So everyone like like you and I, we could go to climeworks dot com and have our personal subscription to remove a certain amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every month with our plans. And that's been quite successful. So so we've we've had since beginning over fourteen thousand customers. And that's increasing. And and that's really for us, that's a good thing, like the fact that so many individuals are into that,

• 42:41Speaker 01

  then drives also more corporate actions.

• 42:43Guy Raz?

  Right. I mean, I understand the why some people would be motivated to do that because they are good global citizens. But the reality is humans are motivated by different things and generally not by by by being virtuous. I mean, look, you and I may may try and live as virtuously as possible. I drive an electric car. I bike most of of the time. I buy food from a farmer's market. But I know at the end of the day, simply by living in a home in a developed country and and even minimizing my electricity and water usage, my global carbon footprint is much higher than somebody in India or somebody in China. Right? And so what would motivate somebody on their own to just send you money every month

• 43:27Guy Raz?

  to remove carbon on their behalf? Like, what do they get out of it, aside from feeling good?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, we also have to think what we need during this first phase during like during this decade we're currently living in. So what they get out of it is well for themselves. And they have taken care of their carbon balance. And but they have also enabled a new industry. And that is, I think, what is what is most intriguing. Like, I'm fully with you, like ninety five percent of the population would likely own. Only do this when they are forced to it. And that's eventually to get to billions of tons of CO2 removal. We need regulation, we need corresponding legislation. We need governmental procurement programs that might be CO2 taxes or CO2 burdens or incentives that we need for the masses, all right? And for really removing billions of tons of CO2 from the air. But that's not what we need now.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Like for the next 10 years, Climeworks and the other companies around us, this whole industry, they need like a couple of billion or let's say 10 or 20 of billions. And that's a relatively small amount. So like those pioneering customers on the private and on the corporate side, they are really enabling us to do the next scale up step and to get to the next level. Once we are there, we need more than that, that is clear. But it's really what they are getting out of it is being a pioneer and enabling a new industry, which I think is a pretty cool thing.

• 44:47Guy Raz?

  So essentially you are setting yourself up for a future where most governments around the world will require their citizens and their businesses to pay some kind of tax to offset their emissions. And in order to do that, they're going to have to use the technology that you are developing. If you're a leader in this industry in 10 years, then it could be a very profitable business.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  That's definitely the case. As you said it in the very beginning, we do have to be a profitable business in order to become climate relevant. There's no other way. And so it's not charity what we're doing. We have to become a business. That's the only way how we can change the world for better.

• 45:28Guy Raz?

  It's a huge, huge undertaking. I mean, just the work that you have put into this over the last 13 years. You have this amazing facility in Iceland, but still just 4,000 tons a year. I mean, I shouldn't say it that way because it's an incredible achievement. But man, it just feels so daunting and overwhelming. Do you ever? Feel that way?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, we've been doing this for almost 13 years now. And I think Kristoff and I have just always been running and running. And it's a marathon we are on. Maybe we are at kilometer five or kilometer 10. But it's a bit like, you know, when you're starting a marathon, you shouldn't think of kilometer 40 when you're at kilometer five. But you should rather like make sure that you that you save your forces for the next five and the next five and the next five kilometers. That's a bit what it is. And and and look at where we're coming from. We started with capturing milligrams of CO2 from the air when our laboratory reactors. And it went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms, from kilograms to tons, from tons to thousand tons. So we did quite a few scale up steps already. So there are a few left. Of course, those are the largest ones then.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  But we need something to do for the next 10 to 15 years, right?

• 46:42Guy Raz?

  It's like a marathon, but it's also like a sprint. It's also like the 100 meter dash because time is running out.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Sometimes it does feel like a sprint indeed. That's right. But yeah, you know, on the other hand, don't forget that that people typically underestimate what technology scale ups can do. I always say like, well, there are many solutions how we can approach this this challenge. But if we look at where humans are really good and is massively scaling up technology. So if we if we can make it developing and implementing and scaling good technology, we can be fast, we can be fast. There's a saying, I think Bill Gates said that once, like you typically overestimate what you can achieve in one year, but you typically underestimate what you can achieve in 10 years. And that's that's a bit the philosophy we are following. And that's how we're racing.

• 47:29Guy Raz?

  Jan, do you think we can we humans can reverse climate change? Do you think we have the capacity to be able to do that within your my lifetime?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I'm convinced that we can, yes.

• 47:39Guy Raz?

  You're convinced we can?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yes, between us and achieving that, there are just humans in between. Technology and physics can do it. It's very easy. You can show it.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  We just have to do it.

• 47:53Guy Raz?

  Amazing, amazing. Jan Burzbacher, thanks so much.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Thank you, Guy.

• 48:02Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at HowIBuiltThis and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy dot Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Chris Messina with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coats.

• 48:47Guy Raz?

  Niva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.