This is CDR

In this episode of This Is CDR, OpenAir welcomes RepAir Carbon CEO Amir Shiner to tell us about the company's novel and energy-efficient electrochemical method of direct air capture (DAC) that is inspired by fuel cell technology. Hosted by Toby Bryce and Megha Raghavan.

Links

- RePair - https://repair-carbon.com/

- OpenAir - https://openaircollective.cc/

About Amir Shiner

Amir Shiner brings over 25 years of industry experience with start-up and technology companies, with a focus on developing and commercializing innovative products. He co-founded RepAir with the vision of restoring the global CO2 balance by developing a highly efficient, sustainable, and scalable Direct Air Capture solution. Amir earned a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology.

For our 50th episode This Is CDR welcomes Lithos Carbon Co-Founders Mary Yap and Dr. Noah Planavsky to tell us how the company accelerates mineral weathering by spreading basalt on croplands, and uses novel soil models and machine learning to maximize CO₂ removal while boosting crop growth.

About our Guests - https://www.lithoscarbon.com

Mary Yap is co-founder and CEO at Lithos, a leading company transforming farmland into carbon capture centers. The team's mission is to accelerate mineral weathering — an integral process in the Earth's carbon cycle that naturally captures CO₂ at the gigaton scale. Lithos's technology incorporates cutting-edge research from Yale and Georgia Tech and uses novel soil models and machine learning to maximize permanent CO₂ removal while boosting crop growth. Lithos is one of five startups from around the globe selected as inaugural suppliers for the Frontier climate fund's first round of permanent carbon credit purchases, and is backed by investors including Union Square Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures. Mary previously studied plant biology at The University of Chicago and geology and planetary sciences at Yale University, where she conducted award-winning scientific and urban research on the climate crisis. Mary previously spent 6+ years scaling early-stage startups to millions of users across 55 countries, and her family are generational smallholder vegetable farmers in Taiwan.

Noah Planavsky is a co-founder at Lithos and an Associate Professor with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University. He is the Director of the Yale Metal Geochemistry Center and is on the steering committee for the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture. As an isotope geochemist, he leverages field studies, analytical chemistry, novel isotope systems, and geochemical modeling to uncover the story of environmental change in Earth’s past, present, and future. He has extensively published on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and currently focuses on deploying carbon capture through enhanced rock weathering in marine and terrestrial systems and tracking how primary productivity has changed through time. Noah has published over 150 papers in high-impact journals, has 15,000+ citations, and is a recipient of the Clarke Medal and the Packard Fellowship, among other awards. Along with their co-founder Chris Reinhard, Noah co-invented Lithos' novel isotope dilution technology to enable cost-effective and precise empirical verification of carbon dioxide removal in soil. Originally from Wisconsin, Noah still co-runs the family farm in the Midwest today.

Join and follow OpenAir!

- https://openaircollective.cc

- Twitter: @openaircollect

In this episode of This Is CDR, OpenAir welcomes NOAA Research Oceanographer Dr. Jessica Cross to discuss the challenges associated with measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of ocean-based CDR methods, and how we can seek to address them in a climate-relevant time-frame.

About our Guest. - https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/dr-jessica-cross

Dr. Jessica N. Cross is a research oceanographer with the NOAA in Seattle, WA. Her current research focuses on carbon biogeochemistry and ocean acidification in Arctic regions, and especially along the Alaskan coast. The main goal is to better understand how acidification processes interact with natural biogeochemical cycles, and eventually to detect geochemical and biological impacts of acidification in marine systems. Dr. Cross conducts her research across a variety of platforms, including ship-based measurements, moorings, and mobile autonomous platforms like gliders and drones, through NOAA's Innovative Technology for Arctic Exploration Program. She also broadly participates in the Arctic research community through the North American Carbon Program, the Ocean Carbon Biogeochemistry Program, the Pacific Arctic Group, and the Interagency Research Policy Committee collaboration teams.

In this episode of This Is CDR, OpenAir welcomes Travertine CEO Dr. Laura Lammers to present the company's innovative electrochemical process that enhances the Earth's natural carbon cycle to precipitate carbonate minerals from carbon dioxide in the air, permanently storing carbon in the solid phase -- while also recycling sulfates from mine tailings and generating green Hydrogen!

ABOUT OUR GUEST - https://www.travertinetech.com/

Dr. Laura Lammers is Founder and CEO of Travertine. Prior to Travertine, Laura was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab specializing in environmental geochemistry. Her group studied the natural chemical processes that regulate the cycling of critical elements in the environment, regulated by mineral-aqueous interfacial reactions.

The Lammers Lab sought to develop a mechanistic understanding of carbonate and phosphate mineralization and selective element separation to inspire and improve approaches for carbon sequestration, environmental remediation, and critical resource recovery. Laura was the recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award (2020), a LBNL Women@the Lab Award (2020), as well as the Mineralogical Society of America Award (2018). She earned her PhD from the University of California-Berkeley Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Center for Isotope Geochemistry, and a BA in Earth Sciences Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College.

In this episode of This Is CDR OpenAir welcomes InterEarth founders Howard Carr and Simon Avenell to tell us about the company's novel method of CDR via sustainably cultivating native wood biomass and securely burying it in saline aquifers on degraded lands in Western Australia.

About our Guests: https://www.inter.earth/

Dr. Howard Carr is InterEarth's inventor, founding CEO and deep technical expert. Geochemist and economic geologist. Extensive experience in the resources and agriculture industries. Also held roles as the CEO of mid-cap mining companies in Australia and Canada.

Dr. Simon Avenell is Co-Founder of InterEarth and strategy and investor relations lead. Economist. Had careers as an academic and in consulting. Former PwC partner. Extensive experience in building and leading diverse teams to solve complex problems.

In this session of This Is CDR, OpenAir welcomes Carbyon Founder and CEO Hans de Neve to present the company’s novel, X-Prize Milestone Award winning “fast-swing” DAC process that employs a continuously rotating drum that consists of activated carbon fibers functionalized with amines.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

- https://carbyon.com/

- https://twitter.com/carbyon

Hans de Neve founded Carbyon in 2019 as a spin-off company from the Dutch research institute TNO. At TNO he was working on novel materials and production technologies for solar panels. He is trained as an electronic engineer and material scientist. His PhD is on III-V semiconductor materials. He worked for many years at Alcatel-Lucent before engaging in the domain of renewable energy about 10 years ago.

In this episode of This Is CDR, OpenAir is pleased to welcome Carbon Drawdown Initiative Founder and CEO Dirk Paessler, and geologist Ingrid Smet to tell us about Project Carbdown, a long-term field enhanced rock weathering (ERW) field trial, with a focus on the Project's efforts to develop effective and practical measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of ERW as a method of durable carbon removal.

About Dirk:

After founding and running Internet/software companies for 30 years, Dirk Paessler turned his attention to climate solutions in 2020. With Carbon Drawdown Initiative he works on speeding up negative emissions together with CTO Ralf Steffens. They currently focus on enhanced rock weathering on croplands as one of the few CDR solutions that can be scaled up to climate relevancy in the next 2-3 decades.

About Ingrid:

Geologist Ingrid Smet obtained a PhD for her geochemical research into Greek volcanoes after which she explored active volcanoes worldwide as a tour organizer. Her research focus shifted to climate change mitigation when in late 2020 she was hired by FSM software company Fieldcode to set up their CO2 removal project. She carries out multiple enhanced weathering field trials in Greece, combining existing agriculture with locally found olivine-rich rocks, in collaboration with Project Carbdown.

About Carbon Drawdown: https://www.carbon-drawdown.de

Carbon Drawdown Initiative GmbH was founded in January 2020 and is focused on promoting research, public discourse, and impact investment in the field of “negative emissions”. This involves the removal of carbon from the atmosphere with subsequent long-term storage of that carbon. This CO₂ removal is crucial to counteracting climate change by achieving “net zero”. This is especially important considering that certain emissions are difficult to avoid and will continue to occur in the future. The next step would then be to reverse the impact of historical emissions to bring current temperatures back down. If this does not happen, the excessively warm climate will continue for millennia.

In addition to public discourse, political work, and early investment in start-ups with innovative concepts for CO₂ removal, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative also launched its own Enhanced Weathering project: “Project Carbdown” tries to measure the actual speed of basalt weathering with synchronized experiments in the lab, in pot experiments and in nature. It is a collaboration of more than 20 scientists and engineers across Europe. Partners are various international universities, including the Alfred Wegener Institute and the universities of Hamburg, Erlangen, Mainz, and Wageningen.

In this episode of This Is CDR, OpenAir welcomes Climate Robotics CEO Jason Aramburu to tell us about the company’s mobile, autonomous pyrolyzers that leverage advanced robotics and artificial intelligence to convert waste biomass to biochar and durably sequester atmospheric carbon in the soil while improving the economics of commercial row-crop agriculture. Hosted by Toby Bryce and Megha Raghavan.

ABOUT OUR GUEST - https://www.climaterobotics.com/

Jason Aramburu is a serial entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist, primarily focused on applications of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics and Trustless Computing to agriculture, mining, logistics, energy, health and climate change mitigation.

Jason was a Forbes 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneur, an Ashoka Fellow, PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and a grantee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is also one of Business Week’s Top 25 Social Entrepreneurs in America.

Jason graduated from Princeton University with a degree, cum laude, in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a certificate in Environmental Studies. He has extensive research experience in both the lab and field, having spent significant time studying and working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama and at Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY OPENAIR - https://openaircollective.cc/

In this episode of This Is CDR, OpenAir co-hosts Chris Neidl and Megha welcome DrawDAO co-founder Charles Van Tassel. DrawDAO is a new Web 3.0 initiative that aims to accelerate the advancement of key carbon removal technologies. DrawDAO partners with prominent mission-aligned artists to raise funds for early stage, opensource carbon dioxide removal & storage projects through the creation and sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Charles shares an overview of DrawDAO's origins and approach, with a focus on Carbon Gardener, the very first DrawDAO supported project scheduled to kick off in September 2022.

Charles is joined by Carbon Gardener project lead, Cornell University researcher, Activate Fellow and This Is CDR return guest Dr. Garrett Boudinot to preview the goals and details of Carbon Gardener.

ABOUT DRAWDAO - https://drawdao.io/

ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Charles Van Tassel comes to DrawDAO from a background in data science, product development, and the arts. He is a co-founder of The Climate Map, a research non-profit exploring all of the different pathways and methodologies of CDRS, and has worked in climate tech at companies ranging in mission from conscious consumerism to carbon-free energy.

Dr. Garrett Boudinot holds a PhD in Geological Sciences, and is one of the world’s leading experts in the area of agricultural enhanced weathering practices. Over the last two years as a Research Associate with Cornell’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Garrett has helped lead pioneering investigations into the carbon removal efficacy of rock dust. This spring he was selected as an inaugural Entrepreneurial Fellow at Activate New York, supported by NYSERDA and Columbia University, where he is working to scale up CDR through commercialization. Garrett is the technical lead for the Carbon Gardener initiative, a collaboration with the OpenAir community and, proudly, the very first project to be supported by DrawDAO later this summer.

In this episode of This Is CDR, we are pleased to welcome Seafields Co-Founder and Director John Auckland and Chief Science Officer Dr. Mar Fernández-Méndez to tell us how the company removes CO2 from the atmosphere and durably sequesters it in the deep ocean via open-sea cultivation of sargassum.

Hosted by Toby Bryce and Irene Polnyi.

ABOUT OUR GUESTS - https://seafields.eco/

John Auckland is an experienced entrepreneur and public speaker who sold his first company before age 30. He founded the global crowdfunding agency, TribeFirst, as well as the GreenTribe Fund, a seed stage ESG fund. John has helped 90+ companies raise over £50M, and has served as Virgin StartUp’s crowdfunding trainer and a Virgin StartUp Ambassador.

Dr. Mar Fernández-Méndez holds an MSc in Marine Microbiology from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, and a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the Alfred Wegener Institute, where she leads a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group. Mar has participated in ten sea-going research expeditions from the Arctic to the Tropics, and published over 20 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. She co-hosts The Sargassum Podcast and is a member of the Ocean Artificial Upwelling project.