Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Climate tech’s surprising bottleneck – land access

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

There’s a bottleneck in climate tech that we don’t talk about enough: land availability. It’s a physical resource you need to support biomass, renewables, mineral mining, and other essential tools of decarbonization. So how much is enough, and where do we need it? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, managing director of research at Energy Impact Partners. Andy argues that land—geography, landscape and the rights to land—will be a common constraint among climatetech solutions as we reach gigaton-scale reductions of emissions. Andy and Shayle survey the industries where the availability of land could play a critical role, exploring questions like: How much land will we need for solar and wind power in deep decarbonization scenarios like the Net Zero America Study, and where? How does that amount of land change depending on siting, permitting and regulatory challenges of building transmission? What about the “pores” of underground space needed for carbon sequestration and hydrogen storage? For technologies that require both land for renewables and underground storage for carbon sequestration, like Direct Air Capture, where do those locations overlap? Could we see a run on waste biomass, given the tight supply of arable land suitable for producing new biomass?  Where will access to land constrain supply of metals needed for batteries and infrastructure? Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arca​dia​.com/​c​a​t​alyst. Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee​.net/join.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shell Khan, and this is Catalyst. The things that are going to stop us from achieving net zero as fast as we need to is land near the top of the list, or do you think this is just, it's a reshuffling of how we use land, but not a big problem? I really just don't believe that the market has digested the public acceptance and siting and environmental permitting risks to net zero scale renewables and transmission.

This week travels through the land of land. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale.

Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at Energy Hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital.

Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So before we get started, I wanted to highlight another podcast that I like called Reversing Climate Change. It's produced by the folks at Norie, the Carbon Removal Marketplace startup. They've had a bunch of really interesting and super diverse guests on it from Pulitzer Prize and James Beard awardees and MacArthur Genius, novelists, musicians, TV personalities. and a whole bunch of scientists, entrepreneurs, policy scholars, and more,

all working on various shades of climate change and carbon removal. Their topics are really interesting and broad. They range from NFTs to vanishing foodways in the fight to preserve them. They include Bangladesh's post-cyclone war of independence against Pakistan, how winemaking is coping with climate change. Mark Fisher's work on hauntologies, which is not a word that I knew before, as applied to carbon removal. obviously the latest on soil science, which is relevant to what Nori does and a whole bunch more.

It's a really broad and fascinating show, so I highly recommend giving you to listen. Once again, produced by Nori, it's called the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I'm Shail Khan. I'm a partner at the venture capital firm, energy impact partners. Welcome. So in the category of things that I don't think we talk enough about as it pertains to decarbonization, there are a few items. that are near the top of my list. One is battery minerals, as evidenced by the episode a few weeks ago with Kurt House from Cobold.

But I think actually emerging at the top of the list for me is land. As you know, my job at the IP is to invest in revolutionary technologies to solve the biggest problems with climate change. And over and over again,

I'll learn about some new solution that has enormous technical and economic merit in a vacuum, but where I'm left with the same set of core questions, which are, you know, where will we do this at scale when we're trying to get to gigatons of impact? What landscapes might that transform? What will it displace on those landscapes?

How might geography be the barrier to global impact for this particular technology pertains to new sources of energy generation and carbon removal and fuels production and all sorts of other things? And it so often comes back to land. So that's what we're going to talk about today. with me for this one was a familiar voice. Andy Lubershane is my colleague at E.P. He's our managing director of research, and he's been cooking up quite a tale on how land will be possibly the factor

that reshapes and possibly slows down the energy transition. So here's Andy. Andy, welcome back to Catalyst. I'm so happy to be back. All right, so I often do not relisten to the episodes that we post on this podcast, but to the few that I have re-listened to, I've discovered an annoying tick that I have,

which is that I tend to start every conversation with some version of the same question, which is like, let's start with the big picture, and then I go on to ask some question. And I've realized that in most of these episodes, the big picture that I'm talking about is in the grand scheme of things still pretty small. But this time, let's talk about the really big picture,

because we are going to talk about land and the role of land and the future of energy and climate. But I know you have a good riff where you wax historical on the sort of role of land in our past as humanity. So let's start with the really big picture. Tell me about land. Yes, happy to provide a history of humanity and land from possibly the world's least informed historian.

So take this with as many grains of salt as you have nearby. So think way way back to around 10,000 years ago when humans invented agriculture, somewhere in that fertile crescent. And at that point, we got everything from the land. We got all of our energy from the land and all of our stuff from the land. And largely in the case of energy, that meant we were getting energy from photosynthesis. And photosynthesis is amazing. It's a miracle.

But if you think about the efficiency of photosynthesis and biological metabolism, it's actually super inefficient. as in it's difficult for a skeptic like me to believe in, you know, something like intelligent design in any way, because there's no intelligent designer in the world that would come up with a system that is so inefficient. And, you know, the way that early humans got energy from photosynthesis was obviously feeding ourselves, but also in the form of the original horsepower. So we would have, you know, photosynthesis, solar energy, creating grass, and then horses would eat that grass,

and then the horses would do useful work for us. And if you think about the total efficiency of that chain of solar energy to horse useful work, it's way less than 1%, probably less than, like, 0.2% conversion of solar energy to stuff we wanted to happen. And we'll come back to this, I think, later in the conversation, but compared that to solar photovoltaics today, which actually is not all that great from an efficiency standpoint.

point. I mean, solar PV is often derided as being pretty inefficient, you know, less than 20% typically conversion of sunlight to electricity. But the total efficiency, if you take solar PV and then run that electricity through an electric motor to do useful work, it's on the order of probably 15 to 20%. So the upshot here is we need like 50 times less land today to get the same amount of energy, useful work done from the sun. Yeah, that's sort of a key point, which is the reason we care about the conversion efficiency of sunlight, basically, mostly does come down to land. It comes down to cost as well. The reason we care about efficiency in PV modules is a combination of land or space, which is most relevant in the immediate context if you're trying to

put solar on a rooftop, but more is relevant, as we'll talk about in the broader context when you're trying to cite like, you know, hundreds of gigawatts of solar. But it also affects, like, the total cost of delivered electricity because the more land, the more space it takes to deliver the same amount of electricity, the more other stuff you need, the more balance of systems costs you have. Anyway, the point being, like a lot of what we care about in conversion efficiency comes down to how much space does it take to convert a certain amount of energy into a certain amount of useful work.

Right. I mean, we have been fortunate for a couple hundred years now, and we haven't had to think about land quite so hard. But early humans thought about land all the time. It was really all they cared about. And then one of the kind of first real energy revolutions was the invention of wind power in the form of mills and sailboats. And mills were nice, but really it was like cross-oceanic sailboats using wind energy. That was kind of the killer energy app, the first killer energy app. at least it was at that point for Europeans who, you know, used all this new energy to do what they'd been doing for, you know, millennia before, which was go and look for more land and conquer more land because that's what they considered so essential to getting all the energy and stuff to run society. You know, Europeans had been fighting over the same land for a couple of thousand years at this point. And, you know, infamously and atrociously, they went out and they conquered land that was occupied at the time by native people.

and also enslaved people and created this, you know, transatlantic slave trade, which from their standpoint, you know, again, completely amorally at the time, immorally, was enslaving people for more energy because that's what they thought they needed. So, you know, I guess that brings us to the last 200 years, which was this really anomalous time in human history when we didn't have to think so hard about land. And that came from this big unlock of finding, fossil fuel underground, this incredibly concentrated source of energy that did have to do with land. I mean, fossil fuel, different forms of fossil fuel are somewhat concentrated geographically around the world.

And we had to figure out how to harness that fossil fuel in the form of steam engines and then later on turbines and electrical generators. But, you know, fundamentally, compared to how humans had thought about land in the past, Fossil fuel separated human energy needs from the land. And if you think about the history of the last 200 years, it's really a history of taking fossil fuel and trading it for stuff from the land, all the other stuff we want, at just an extraordinarily accelerating and kind of ruthless rate. Right. Okay. So here we are then today. We've had the benefit of spending a couple hundred years,

is mostly extracting extremely concentrated sources of energy from underground. And now we're headed into this brave new world where we're trying to decarbonize the entire global economy and replace, in many cases, a lot of those fossil fuels with other things. So what you and I have been talking about a lot is the role that land may play again. And so is your sort of fundamental premise here that we had to care a lot about land in the early days. We've had this, you know, historically brief period of time where we haven't had to care so much about it. And now we're heading back into a period where it's going to come to the fore again. That's it, essentially. I don't think we're going to go back to caring quite about land in the same way

we did, you know, in the early days of agriculture or, you know, in the middle ages. But I do think one way you can conceive of the energy transition, one way, you know, I've been conceiving of the energy transition more and more, is kind of reversing the trade we've made for the past 200 years. So instead of always trading cheap fossil energy for more land and more material, we're going to be starting to make trades where we have to use land and give up some land and some material in exchange for low-cost clean energy. And there's a bunch of examples of this. And the more you and I have been talking about this, the more I've been looking, the more you start to see out there.

So let's run through some of those examples. I think the obvious one, but also probably, it's funny, it's both the obvious one and the one that I think both you and I agree, like people are not paying enough attention to, is the land impacts, requirements, and barriers that are going to be faced by converting a big portion of our electricity generation from fossil fuels to mostly wind and solar. So just walk through the kind of land, the ramifications from a land perspective of doing that at large scale. Right. So, you know, the first thing most people think about when they think of wind and solar in terms of their constraints is their intermittency. And that's true. It's intermittency is a big challenge for wind and solar. But like you said, in a way, the more obvious thing when you look at a wind farm or a solar farm compared to a coal plant is actually how much space they take up. So, you know, when you look at some of the more recent and really sophisticated and excellent studies of getting to net zero carbon, not just in the power sector, but economy-wide over the next 30-ish years, one of the consequences is, you know, you often end up with very high levels of wind and solar penetration in electricity supply. And, you know, typically that takes up on the order of, and I'm being U.S. centric here, because most of the studies that I've looked at are. focused on the U.S. in North America, you know, that wind and solar takes up something like

5, 10 percent of the total land in the continental, you know, 48 states, which on the one hand doesn't sound like a lot, but it's actually, it is a lot. I mean, that's an incredible amount of space taken up by energy production compared to today. And, you know, in both cases, it has a dramatic impact on the landscape. We're talking about across much of the Midwest of this country turning, you know, a lot of current agricultural land into combined agricultural and wind farms, sprinkling solar farms across the southeast and the mid-Atlantic region, pretty much anywhere you can, anywhere you can kind of find an open field, lots of giant solar farms across the west as well. And then offshore wind, you know, blanketing the horizon, almost anywhere

you look off the northeast coast and maybe with floating offshore wind off the west coast as well. You know, this is going to impact the landscape for people in ways that when you get to really net zero scale, I don't think people are fully contending with the potential risks in terms of public acceptance. I think there's that. And the other piece is it's not, there's a reason why all, I think all of these studies end up suggesting that we do that, which is sprinkle a bunch of solar and a bunch of wind all over the country, as opposed to, you know, I'm sure you've seen somebody post. one of these images of like, we could power the entire country with this tiny little square of land in the Mojave Desert, right? Which is technically true if you just put blank at the Mojave with solar, basically. The reason we don't do that is transmission, right? And the thing that is, to me, the landscape impacts are real, but that's not the fundamental barrier to me for getting all this done. It is moving the electricity from the place of generation to the place of

consumption and the land impacts of transmission where you have a much, even a much harder time citing anything new. Completely agree. I mean, the same studies which show, you know, that level of wind and solar deployment and land consumption for, you know, a net zero scenario end up with something on the order of three times or more than three times the number of megawatt miles, which is a wonky term. But, you know, you. you know, the amount, the total capacity of electric transmission in the country. And oftentimes those megawatt miles, unlike a lot of the transmission capacity today, which is mostly intrastate, or at least intra-region, you know, this new transmission

capacity is going to have to be moving massive amounts of wind and solar among multiple states and between regions, which historically have just not been good at coordinating and collaborating on all the approvals you need to build that kind of transmission. And if there's one empirical fact of the past decade plus of wind and solar development, it's that transmission on that magnitude is incredibly difficult to cite and permit and build, which has been well documented in a lot of places, including on this podcast. Books, you know, Superpower by Russell Gold is a good one to read that just like is a fascinating read and also very depressing about what it takes to build transmission.

and there's new examples happening all the time. What's the most reason what's up in your neck of the woods, right? There's like a hydro plant that they're trying to build transmission down to New York or something like that. You're in Maine, so it's probably through you. Yeah, I'm so ashamed. What was that one? I'm so ashamed of my fellow Mainers. Yeah, I think it's the clean energy connect.

I think I don't remember exactly what it's called. But we just had a citizen referendum that rejected a transmission line moving through Maine to deliver hydro power to Massachusetts. And, you know, nimbism is real. And it's a stronger force than its cute little name suggests. I was just going to say, I don't want to, I don't want to make it sound like I'm dismissive of building out a lot more wind and solar capacity. I just think, I think that the market at large and scenario planners for net zero are not contending with. Yeah. And there's also a bunch of things that sort of fall out from that. ranging from what can we do if we say we can't build out all of the transmission capacity that we need,

but we still can build the wind and solar. So we have enough electricity generation, but we don't have the way to get it to the market that we like, which is transmission. There's alternatives that sort of start to become more interesting, the more you think about that. Yeah, completely agree there as well. And I think what you're starting to allude to there is probably converting that wind and solar electricity into a form that is easier to move with less impact on the landscape. And that's probably a molecular fuel like hydrogen. So moving energy by pipeline historically,

even in the past 10 years when there's been a lot of pushback on new natural gas pipeline development in some parts of the country, you know, it's still typically less than three times, often less than five times cheaper or more than five times cheaper to move energy. you know, on a joules per mile basis in the form of a gas through a pipeline than it is in the form of an electric transmission line. And that's imagining you can actually get an electric transmission line cited and permitted and built and built it all compared to pipelines, which historically have been easier to do so for. And so I, you know, I completely do, I agree. I really think that one of the highest and best uses for clean hydrogen is as a transmission mechanism where you can

go out to these really remote areas where no one's going to care as much. Your hypothetical Mojave Desert example, build just incredible amounts of the cheapest possible wind and solar you can, forget all about grid connection, and move it via pipeline to big demand centers. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators,

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transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital. As I talk with people deploying capital,

shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of remote locations and the impacts of not being able to build transmission,

I mean, the other thing that we've talked about a fair bit is picture of future world where there's a bunch of big industrial processes that need to run. And most of big industrial processes either want to run on really, really cheap energy or all the time. And imagine what they care about. Imagine they're very energy intensive. And so big portion of the cost comes from the energy cost. And it becomes increasingly true that it is difficult to build new transmission. and so we're sort of facing this little bit of a crisis and electricity.

You can imagine coming where intermittency drives really volatile prices, and at the same time, you know, maybe reliability actually starts to be a challenge. We're starting to see this in some places now. There's some other possible things that could happen from that, which could result in a couple different shades of on-site generation for industrial processes, either on-grid or off-grid, potentially, which is interesting because the sort of initial iteration of fears around grid defection from utility industry was around residential solar. But I've been starting to wonder whether it happens in the industrial sector,

not actually in the residential sector. That's possible. We're starting to see big new sources of energy demand in the case of data centers, for example, that have some flexibility about when they run and can run potentially profitably at a somewhat lower capacity. factor, go out to these locations where you have super, super cheap wind and solar power. And I think that could be just the start of it. Most of the energy demand in heavy industry is for heat. It's not currently coming in the form of electricity. It's usually from combusting fossil fuel directly on site.

But if you do have super, super cheap wind and solar generation, and you have a way of storing that clean energy, that clean electricity in the form of heat, which is what these industrial processes need. And, you know, I won't be coy here. We at EIP have an investment in the space in a company called Rondo Energy. You know, you can go to these places with super, super cheap wind and solar and absorb that wind and solar, you know, during the periods of the day when it's generated and then dispatch it really cost effectively as heat for industrial processes, pretty much 24-7, which is when industrial processes want heat. So it's a clever concept, and it's possible it could start driving more industrial load

out to the old middle of nowhere. I'm a big believer in this happening in one of a number of ways. I think this is going to be a big macro trend, and in fact, we've made multiple bets at EIP that can approach this in different ways. You mentioned Rondo. I think if hydrogen ends up being the solution, we've invested in electric hydrogen. In some cases, you just build an electrochemical battery that provides, if it's extremely cheap and extremely long durations, we invest in form energy, which does that.

So I think through some combination of these different options, like, we're going to start to see more of this kind of thing happen. But I want to talk about land beyond just the context of renewables and transmission, though that's a huge part of it, because as you've pointed out to me, like, all of the other sort of components of this big decarbonization trend also has. land ramifications. So name another one outside of just generating electricity. So the next one is not land itself, but it's under the land. It's underground. And I guess, you know, what I've what I've heard it described as is poor space. So we're looking for

porers underground that you can put one of two things mostly. Either hydrogen. So either you're creating clean hydrogen and then looking for locations underground, where you can just store massive quantities of it. So that hydrogen can be, you know, a strategic energy reserve of sorts and also a very, very long duration storage mechanism potentially for the electricity sector. And then the second thing we're almost certainly going to be putting a bunch of underground in these pores is carbon dioxide. So CCS at any significant scale is going to have to be, sequestering carbon most likely in geological permanent geological repositories.

And so, you know, when you look at macro analyses of the amount of poor space that's available coming from, you know, different types of underground formations like, you know, saline deposits, for example, there's plenty of it. I mean, there's just a massive amount of space to put stuff underground. And in fact, we've been creating more of that space over the past, you know, 150 years by unearthing fossil fuels. But the challenge, so the challenge here is not, is not a macro level amount of pore space. It's finding the right places to inject these gases underground and also making sure you have the right to put it there. Because the thing about injecting, say, CO2 underground is that once you start putting it underground, it kind of seeps through these pores. And it's

hard to control exactly where it goes. And you have to make sure you have the right to put CO2 in underground formations under all the landowners that you're putting it under, at least according to the law of the land at the moment. So I do think we're going to see more competition around securing rights for poor space and strategically relevant areas. Oh yeah. We've definitely already started to see. I mean, there's land grabs in both of these areas. If you're looking for salt domes to store hydrogen. There's absolutely a bunch of, I don't know what to call, but there's a bunch of exploration

and there's a land grab around. There are only so many of those really big salt domes. Same thing you're starting to see with potential CO2 sequestration sites. So I think undeniably, that's going to be, you know, we're not the only ones to recognize that those two types of storage will have

value in the near future and people are starting to go after those sites. And actually these things overlap, right? Because, you know, if you assume, that we're going to be doing a bunch of direct air capture, which is powered by ultra-clean electricity, then actually what you want is a place that has really, really good renewable resources and poor space underground where you can just hook up cheap solar to a big DAC machine and then pump the CO2 underground right there. So we're starting to see places where

you need to look for the overlap of different types of features of the land that will make it really valuable. Right. Okay, so that's underground poor space from a land perspective. Let's cover one more generally underground thing, which is, and we've talked about this, recently on this podcast, sort of the minerals impact, metals and minerals impact of the energy transition also has land ramifications because of what we're going to need, particularly, well, both in the context of building like transmission and renewables, but also in particular in building batteries. Right. I mean, the energy transition requires two things. It requires more metal and it requires different metal. And the more metal piece is probably less impactful in the long run. I mean,

it is true. And another obvious thing when you look at, you know, a wind farm and a solar farm compared to, say, you know, a natural gas power plant, that it takes more steel, it takes more cement to build a wind farm than it does on a, you know, a normalized basis that the amount of material to produce a gigawatt hour, say, of energy per year, you know, we're on the order of probably something like seven or eight times the amount of steel and cement to make a gigawatt hour per year of wind than to make a gigawatt hour per year of natural gas fired power generation. So, you know, there is a significant increase in metals demand there. But from a global market standpoint, the total impact, at least according to the analysis we've done on, say, the steel market is meaningful and especially maybe meaningful in some regional contexts, North America being one of them.

But it's kind of marginal in terms of global steel production. And so I don't think that that element, the just more metals aspect of the energy transition, is that. is the big one. I think the big one is something, you know, like you said, you've discussed on the pod before, which is the different metals impact. So we're going to need a lot more copper, for example, to electrify vehicles and for generators in wind power, for example. And then, of course, there's rarer metals, lithium being the by far most obvious one, but also things like cobalt and zinc and nickel, where, you know, we see in most cases global supply being sufficient to meet the needs of the energy transition, but just an enormous concentration of supply in

certain areas that pretty much, you know, you can think of as rewriting the rules of global geopolitics. So again, it comes back to land and which land you need and which land is the most valuable, globally speaking. And of course, so far we have not talked about what I would argue is the biggest sort of land question mark, because it is how we use most of our arable land that humans have developed today, which is for crops, for plants. And that, you know, we're going to have a very near-term future episode on biomass and sort of everything you might do with it and what makes sense to do with it and not to do with it in the context of decarbonization. But it, what I think is interesting about it is the versatility of so you grow crops you can do so many different things

with those crops you can obviously consume them you can feed them to animals that you then consume you can turn them directly into energy you can i mean you can burn them and turn them into energy you can use them for carbon removal you can combine those two things and do both of those you can convert them into bioplastics or into biofuels or like in you know so the the things you could do with them are sort of endless, but they also require a lot of land. And to your point photosynthesis is not an efficient process from a, from a land perspective. And so there are definitely going to be places where the, if you're looking at this from like a really high level, global systemic perspective, there will be competition for land between amongst multiple uses,

either crops versus, say, electricity generation, or even within crops, crops for usage X versus usage Y, which is what we've done with corn in the U.S. We've turned out to grow a bunch of corn to produce ethanol rather than to produce food. So I feel like that dynamic is going to be, we're going to see that repeated, you know, sort of over and over again in a bunch of different contexts. Yeah, stepping back for a second and talking about, you know, use of land for what we used to use land for, which is growing biomass for crops and such. A fun fact, I recently looked up and learned. So in my lifetime, and I'm 38 years old, so, you know, global human population has nearly doubled. Not quite. But, you know, I think most people listening would be surprised, you know, I don't know, Shale,

guess how much additional agricultural land on net we've used globally speaking during that time frame when the global human population is nearly doubled? Like what percentage of additional? Yeah, what percentage? How much additional? Well, I guess you do. The population is doubled, but we've grown more efficient. So let's say, like, we've increased total crop land by like 50%.

We've increased total crop land by zero. Because we've grown so much more efficient. Yes, on net, the exact same amount of agricultural land. globally speaking that we used when I was born. And that's because not, it's two factors. One, we've grown much more efficient, you know, industrial agriculture is spread from, you know, industrial economies to more emerging economies, but also we're just throwing fertilizer at the problem. So while the amount of land we use hasn't increased, the amount of fertilizer we use, and both nitrogen fertilizer and phosphate-based fertilizer has increased by about that same percentage.

So it's about doubled, not quite over that period. So I think it's worth thinking about that in the context of all of these new potential uses out there for biomass at the nexus of energy and carbon that you were describing earlier. And I think one of the fundamental premises I've come to believe is that I don't think globally speaking we're going to expand much beyond the amount of land that we use today for the amount of the world's photosynthetic potential that we use for human purposes. I don't think we can if we're going to preserve any measure of global biodiversity. you know, I think one of the, one of the challenges for lots of biomass pathways for either carbon removal, if you're using photosynthesis to suck up carbon from the atmosphere and then you're disposing of that carbon in some way, or if you're using biomass for energy or some

combination of those things in the form of what's known as Bex, you know, biomass plus biomass energy plus carbon capture and sequestration, is, you know, if you're going to do that at really, really globally significant scale, you probably need to dedicate crops to it. You need new dedicated land growing crops for that biomass. And, you know, jury's still out, right? But I'm skeptical we're going to see that happen. And what that means is actually you have a run not on new land, but probably a run on what's called what is considered waste biomass. So there is a lot of waste from forestry and from agriculture that today, some of it is just emitted as carbon, whether it just burned directly or, you know, it degrades into carbon plus methane later.

And that waste biomass is much smaller in supply, but very high value when it comes to some of these carbon energy uses. And so, yeah, I do think we're going to see a lot more competition for that stuff. All right. So just to wrap up here, back to the big picture, I suppose, what's your overall view on the degree to which land is going to be a barrier in decarbonization? Do you think of this as being, if you're ranking the things that are going to stop us from achieving net zero as fast as we need to, is land near the top of the list? Or do you think this is just, it's a reshuffling of how we use land, but not a big problem? The two parts that I'm most concerned about are constraints on wind and solar.

development and the transmission that we know is needed to make wind and solar happen at much, much larger scale. As we said earlier, I really just don't believe that the market has digested the public acceptance and siting and environmental permitting risks to net zero scale renewables and transmission. So that's one of them. And that's one of the reasons I believe that renewables are not all will ever need for power sector decarbonization. I do think we need some additional form of very power-dense, you know, something that can replace coal power from a land-use standpoint. Something nuclear-esque, let's say. And then the second area that I'm concerned about is energy transition metals.

So, you know, rewriting global politics is complicated and comes with challenges that we don't fully understand. stand yet. And when it comes to, you know, the strategic location of things like lithium, rare earth metals, all of the processing facilities for those materials to get them into electric vehicles, et cetera, I think we're going to have some surprises, let's say, over the next couple decades to come. And it is something that I worry about being, you know, hurdles along the way for the transition. All right. Much more to talk about here. but we will save it for a future conversation. Andy, thanks as always for joining.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Shale. Andy Lubershane is the managing director of research at EIP. So what did you think? If you liked the show today, go over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating or review. This show, as always, is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. You can find the show on Twitter at App CatalystPod.

You can also find me, PostScript, and Canary there too. If you want to know more about today's topic, just head over to canarymedia.com for links and more info on the show. PostScript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across the entire range of sectors, which includes advanced energy, food, and agriculture, transportation, and logistics, advanced materials in manufacturing, and advanced computing. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Our executive producer is Stephen Lacey. mixing by Greg Vilfrank and Sean Marquand, theme song by Sean Marquand. Our managing producer is Cecily Mesa Martinez.

I'm Shel Khan, and this is Catalyst.