How I Built This with Guy Raz - Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Cutting emissions alone will not be enough. To avoid the worst effects of global climate change, Heirloom CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala believes we’ll also need to pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere...This week on How I Built This Lab, Shashank’s leap into climate entrepreneurship, launching the company that, in just four years, built North America’s first operational carbon capture facility. Plus, Heirloom’s novel approach to carbon removal—one tray of limestone at a time.This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music by Ramtin Arablouei.It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carla Esteves. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you think about the big ideas out there to fight global climate change, like we often do on this show, what we're talking about fundamentally is reducing the overall amount of carbon dioxide CO2 in the atmosphere.

And a big part of that is finding ways to stop adding carbon dioxide to the air in the future, like with clean alternatives to fossil fuels. But another part of the equation is to remove CO2 that's already been released. And this is where direct carbon capture technology comes in. Back in November of 2023, the first commercial direct carbon capture capture technology comes in. facility in the U.S. opened in California, and it uses a new method that's fast, relatively inexpensive, and it can be scaled up pretty quickly. The company behind the facility is called Aerloom, and its co-founder is Shishank Samala. Even though the company was only launched in April of

2020, by the end of this decade, Shishank says airloom's technology could start to make a meaningful dent in removing CO2 worldwide. Shishank's background in business began in 2013 when he was just 22 years old. He co-founded an electronics manufacturing company called Tempo Automation, which built circuit boards used in everything from rockets to medical devices to consumer electronics. But even though Tempo had contracts for major clients like NASA, after a while, Shishonk found himself wanting to focus on something bigger. You know, several years into starting the business, I realized that, you know, I wanted to work on something that had a much more profound.

find impact on society generally. And, you know, I found that I just couldn't wake up in the morning, be, you know, motivated and think that I would be doing this for the rest of my life. So that's when I started thinking about, okay, sort of what's next and what are other problems I could help contribute to. I guess in the year after you left your job at Tempo Automation, you joined an organization to be an entrepreneur in residence. And I think this is a climate policy organization. Tell me about what you start to think about during that year. Yeah. So really during some of my last

years at Tempo, I was spending my nights and weekends thinking about specifically climate. I grew up in Southeast India, so a lot of the things I was reading about where the worst impacts of climate are faced by the world's most vulnerable people that resonated with me. And I knew I wanted to work in climate. So during that journey, I learned about the importance of carbon removal. So, you know, some friends of mine had started this organization called Carbon 180, which is all about

finding pathways, both from policy and a technology perspective, to make a dent in this carbon removal problem. So it was really a chance for me to go in and sort of think from 30,000 feet. And I was specifically interested in technology methods. So I spent a lot of time talking to scientists, latest research, building cost models, understanding which pathways are most promising. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the challenge we're facing, right? And we've talked about this on the show before, but it would be helpful if you could outline it a little bit, which is global carbon emissions have not been reduced to the targets that have been set in previous years and they won't be. But in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, we have to not only burn less carbon and release less carbon in the atmosphere, we have to remove it from the atmosphere. We can't do just one or the other. We have to do both, right?

Exactly right. We can't just reduce emissions anymore. It won't be enough to stop climate change. If we've emitted too much. And, you know, you can't reduce emissions. You've already emitted. So we have to start removing some of that carbon. from the atmosphere. By some, I mean, in the tune of billions of tons of CO2 per year. And so the idea is that eventually, when this can be scaled up, it will start to have a significant impact on carbon levels in the atmosphere. Exactly. You know, when you think about the overall decarbonization formula, right, you have to decarbonize every single part of the economy. You have to decarbonize electricity by going from fossil fuels to solar and wind and, you know, hydro and so forth, you have to decarbonize agriculture,

shipping, aviation, steel, concrete, et cetera. And in this formula, there is a few sectors that are hard to abate. So because some of those sectors will be slow to decarbonize, we need to complement them by removing carbon from the air. So you started to look at carbon capture, carbon removal as a possible sort of a solution. And you have a, I mean, you had a background in computers and design, robotics. So, but from an engineering standpoint or perspective, this is a different problem to solve. So how did you even start to go about thinking about, you know, how to make this work? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, so my background coming in was manufacturing and robotics and automation.

And this problem set is mostly chemical engineering, process engineering, something that I hadn't done professionally. A lot of it was me relearning high school chemistry and brushing up on fundamental thermodynamics and, you know, heat of reactions and so forth. So, you know, I wasn't the expert in them. I didn't have my PhD. But I do think the fact that I came in from a third-party perspective, gave me the chance to evaluate all these different methods and approaches in a very unbiased way, right?

So, you know, for me, because I come from manufacturing where, you know, which has thin margins, and you really have to know where the cents and dimes go, you know, I was evaluating each of these approaches through a robust cost model that I built from the ground up. So, yeah, it's a, it was fun just really learning a lot of the science. So, all right, let's talk about carbon capture, because the, There are, and this technology has been around for some time, you know, and essentially, I think what most of us think about in carbon capture is I'm like giant, you know, sort of, let's just imagine like a shipping container with huge fans on top of these containers. And they suck in air and they essentially filter out the carbon, which is then, you know, pumped underground. And there's a company we've done on the show Climbworks that does this in Iceland.

This was not the model you were thinking about, right? Yeah, that's right. So for me, I didn't have any existing mental model for how to remove carbon from the air. For me, what really matters mattered most was cost and scalability. So I was looking at each one of these approaches from that perspective. So there are many different ways that people were trying to pull carbon from the air. But the CO2 in the air is very dilute. You're pulling one molecule of CO2 out of every 2,500 molecules.

So fundamentally, it's an expensive gas separation problem. So the traditional way folks have gone about it was basically to build a novel material artificially. But the problem was not whether you could capture the CO2. The problem was the cost of making that material. And because the supply chains don't exist, you often had to use these exotic hard-defined materials. So, you know, if you ever wanted to pull billions of tons from the air, the infrastructure just wasn't there, it would have been massive and expensive. So we came at it from a different perspective, which was, you know, how do we enhance nature? How do we, you know,

are there things that we can borrow from nature, you know, basically for free to solve the same problem? We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, heirloom comes up with a more natural solution to the carbon removal problem. One, that could be low cost and massively scalable. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Airloom co-founder and CEO Shishonk Samala. Airloom's technology takes CO2 from the air in order to reverse some of the climate effects from centuries of burning fossil fuels. All right, so I mentioned Climworks, which is another carbon removal company that operates in Iceland.

But the technology that they're working with, I guess you decide to take a somewhat of a different approach. Because of course, from what I understand, for that kind of model to work at scale, you need to cover the Sahara Desert in these shipping containers sucking air out, constantly filtering it out. And even then, part of it feels like a drop in the bucket. You know, drop in the ocean, I should say, right? It's like you're removing just a tiny bit of carbon from the atmosphere. But by and large, that has been the model for decarbonization. Yeah, I think in general, decarbonization and carbon removal, both have to be done in a distributed way all across the world. It will all seem small in any given location, but collectively, they will amount to billions of tons.

I mean, that's how we emit today, CO2. If you think about that question, what does society actually make billions of tons of, like in mass? Like, can you think about a few things? I mean, I would think cement, for example, construction material. Yeah, so it's three things. It's cement, steel, and fossil fuels. Like, those are the only three things that we make in billions of tons. Okay.

Exactly. I mean, just think about that. Even food or rice, like, there's in the, you know, millions or hundreds of millions. But when you think about doing things at a billion ton scale, which we have to remove carbon from the air, like, you have to have this. mindset of cost and scalability through and through. And that basically, if you have that lens, you end up filtering out, you know, most things that you see. So as you started to look at what you could possibly do, tell me how, what you landed on it, because it's the model that you ended up, because you found out this company not very long ago, but the model is not about

sucking air from the atmosphere. Yeah. So, I mean, we're still sort of removing carbon from the atmosphere, but sort of not in the most traditional way. So the first hypothesis was if you want to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air, whatever the sponge you use has to be abundant and very, very cheap and close to free as possible. And in that journey, we found that carbonates, you know, magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate are some of the most abundant materials on the planet. also have something called Alclanetti, which is the ability to be very thirsty for CO2, if you will.

So we found that limestone specifically is, you know, you can get this stuff for like 30, 40 bucks a ton. There's trillions of tons of limestone across the world. There's 4% of the earth's crust. And we picked this and we realized that, okay, limestone is available. It is cheap. We can use this as a sponge. And what we realized is that, like, even that wasn't enough. We needed to figure out how to enhance it, how to give it superpowers, how to supercharge it to remove carbon much faster than it naturally would.

Just to clarify, because obviously I'm not a scientist, but I'm assuming when you talk about limestone, you're essentially talking about it behaving like a sponge. Yeah. Like a dry sponge in water, except you put the limestone. you know, you just stick it outside and it naturally absorbs carbon? Yeah. So limestone by itself is a sponge already with water, right? So the first thing that we do effectively is give it superpowers by first baking it in a kiln, right? So effectively we pull the water out of a sponge and it turns into calcium oxide, which is lime.

And lime is very thirsty for CO2. That is what we effectively exposed to the air to pull CO2 from the air. All right. So just to understand the heirloom technology, because, again, it's a different method from some of the other carbon capture companies. You're heating up limestone in order to turn it into calcium oxide. And then what happens? So when you bake limestone in the kiln, the output, the lime, is super thirsty for CO2. like it wants to be naturally stable by pulling carbon from the air, right?

So that property is what we take advantage of by taking thin layers of lime and placing them on trays. So imagine very large baking trays, right? And we stack these baking trays vertically to, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 feet. And you effectively have a very tall baking rack with trays with thin. layers of lime. And as the air passes through, basically gobbles up that CO2. And in a few days, it turns into calcium carbonate, which is limestone, which is exactly where you started with. So that's how we capture the CO2. All right. So you've got this technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And it's a

different way of doing. It's using limestone. And let's talk about the business side of this, right? I know you've raised about a little over $50 million to get this off the ground. and tell me how the business model works, what you sell and how you make, how you essentially make money. Yeah. So today our customers are corporations with carbon net zero targets. And soon corporations with compliance requirements to become net zero. So today we have customers like Microsoft and Stripe, Meta, who are buying remodels from us to help them reach net zero. So they've made commitments to be net zero. They pay you money. to remove carbon from the atmosphere to reduce their output, their output of emissions.

Exactly. So, you know, for a company like Microsoft, which has a lot of emissions from, you know, things like running data centers, they're buying as much renewable energy and decarbonizing as much as they possibly can. And what they realize is that the last 30, 40 percent of the emissions, they have to remove from the air. And that's why they come to us and they buy carbon removals. So let's talk about the opportunities here. I mean, right now, This is not required. These are just companies making voluntary decisions. There's no cap and trade system in the United States. And there's a limited version in Europe. But tell me where you see this opportunity headed. I think in general, if you want to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air, there has to be compliance markets in a very large way. You know, not just in Europe, but also in the U.S. and, you know, from basically every other country.

But, you know, in the short term, you're exactly right. There's lots of corporations who either have NED zero targets or see compliance targets coming down the pipe and are getting ready to buy removals. So I actually just came off from a call with a customer who was a shipping company. And they basically told us that to send ships into and out of Europe, they have to buy carbon removals and have to reach a set of emissions targets year by year for the next 10, 20 years. So, you know, what we are seeing is that actually I think there's a really good survey that Boston Consulting Group did on the demand for, carbon removals. What they saw is that just from the voluntary carbon markets, there's a massive shortfall in the projected supply of carbon removals in 2030. So how big is the potential for this market? Well, you know, at least to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to remove anywhere

from 5 to 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air. So if you think about the overall climate math, right, We emit 50 billion tons a year, and if we can get 80 to 90% of the weight through with decarbonization and reduction, you're left with 5 to 10 billion tons that you have to remove from the air. So, you know, we think that in a medium to long term, the carbon price is likely going to be in the $100 to $200 per ton mark. And at that cost for 5 to 10 billion tons, we were talking about a trillion dollars worth of carbon removal industry. Right now it's about 600, some say as high as $1,000 per ton to remove carbon. So the costs are really prohibitively high in some cases. But the goal is to get it down to $100 a ton. Right.

I mean, that's really the magic number, right? And that's really the lens that we've taken from the beginning, where it actually gets it to $100 a ton. You know, at the end of the day, what we are doing is just putting a bunch of rocks and a bunch of trays, right? That's why we think that going for simplicity and scalability, and if you ever want to reach billions of tons, it has to be affordable by society. It cannot be, you know, 500 or 700 bucks a ton. It has to be much slower. And I think that's really how you get to make a lot of impact in the world.

It has to be incredibly accessible. When we come back after the break, Shashonk's plans to build carbon capture facilities all across the United States and eventually the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is the co-founder and CEO of the Direct Carbon Capture Company, Airloom. So, all right, so right now, you've got a facility up and running in the U. I think it's a first commercial facility in the U.S., right? Yeah, so this is the first director-capture facility in North America that captures and stores CO2 from the air. It's, you know, it's small. But it's what we think,

It is. It's a blueprint of what we think carbon removal at scale looks like. You know, there's lots of things that we learned along the way, right? Actually putting steel in the ground and building projects is very different than being, you know, building prototypes and experimenting with science in the lab. Obviously, both are important, but we, you know, that's why we learned this year. And this is Tracy, California. So how much carbon is it, I mean, is it, is it operating now as we speak? Yes. It's operating now. So the capture capacity is about 1,000 tons a year. You know, it's a modular system.

We deployed about 24 units. And next year we're, you know, increasing at least by 10x, building another facility. And what happens to those limestone panels once they've absorbed all the carbon? Yeah. So after the limestone absorbs the carbon from the air, we put it back in the oven to heat it up and pull out the CO2 it captured from the air. And that CO2, it's pure CO2. It's over 99%.

And what we do with it is we compress it. We turn into a liquid. For this facility, we are specifically storing it into concrete. So concrete has this ability to sequester CO2 permanently. So that's what we're doing right now. And starting next year, we're going to be sequestering CO2 underground safely and securely. So, I mean, tell me about how you, you know, when you build out a model, right, for the business side, what are you depending on? I mean, you're, obviously, you're, you've got these companies in the U.S. who are buying credits. But can you rely on that alone as a source of revenue? Yeah. So just in a short time frame, these markets have gotten very, very, very large, right?

This year, we signed a contract with Microsoft. It's about $350,000 tons. It's a multi-100 million dollar deal. And, you know, for us, we think that just the voluntary carbon market will be scaling up to hundreds of millions of tons, you know, according to BCG, between 100 to 200 million tons by the end of the decade. And, you know, there is, we think that the price is going to coalesce around $300 per ton, given where the supply and demand is. But at the same time, you know, the world cannot get to net zero without compliance markets. So a lot of this has to be driven by policy. And we've seen that a bit with the Inflation Reduction Act, which has something called the 45Q.

It gives additional $180 per ton tax credit to companies pulling carbon from the air and putting it underground. So that is happening in the U.S., you know, it's probably the biggest thing that's happening. into directory capture. And I think that will likely be a stepping stone to what will come next, which are very large compliance markets. And tell me about the scale. How many of these facilities will you have to build to start making an impact? We want to get to a billion tons a year. You know, that's really our goal here. So the facilities that we're going to build, each facility is going to be around a million tons per year. We should be. We should be a So we're going to continue to increase the size of the plant, size of the project.

So basically, we need to increase the scale by about 1,000x for the size of the plant. And then to reach a billion tons, you need to build 1,000 of those. So we're talking, you know, tremendous scale and growth in the next 10, 15 years. And so explain the footprint of these things. Like, how big is it going to be? What is it? Where are they going to exist? Like, I'm talking about.

huge plots of land you know 500 by 500 square miles just covered in these things like tell me what it's going to look like yeah so it's amazing how land efficient that these actually are so compared to trees these are actually about

five to 10,000 times more land efficient so to remove a billion tons so I talked about a thousand plans you need a few Disney worlds and the reason for that is how efficient that are, you know, footprint-wise. So, you know, we just built a plant that is about 40-foot

tall. And the next side we're going to build is going to be about 75 feet tall. And the one after that is going to be, you know, what, 130 feet tall. So how many square feet or acres of land? So it's going to be, you know, smaller than a golf course, like an 18-hole golf course, or maybe a better way. If you think about a cement facility, you know, it's going to be, you know, less than quarter of the size of a cement facility. And where will you build your next facility? The next facility is, you know, recently we won this Director of Capture Hub award

from the Department of Energy. So we won about $600 million to build a facility that can scale up to a million tons a year. And that is Southwest Louisiana. So Louisiana is where we currently have our sites in to scale in the medium term. But, you know, we want these facilities all across the world. If you think about where renewable energy is cheap and where there's a lot of

land and where you can put CO2 underground, right? You know, director capture can pull CO2 anywhere in the world. So we can be very strategic in finding places, finding sites to site these facilities. And, you know, we love the Rift Valley in Kenya where there's a lot of excess geothermal energy. So we can start building these in the global south. We can build these in, you know, in India. So there's lots of places in the world where we can find low-cost renewable energy where there's a lot of supply, but not a lot of demand from civilization. Yeah. And when do you break ground on the facility in Louisiana? We're going to be breaking ground in Louisiana, actually next year. So we're actually

building multiple facilities in Louisiana. But the one that we're building for the DAC up is a few years away, but there's other ones that we're building as well. As a business, what is your ultimate goal? When you look at metrics, where do you want to be in five or ten years? Yeah, within five years, our big goal is to get to a megaton, right? Increase the size of this plant to a million tens a year. The nice thing about our business is it's very clear what impact you can have, right? It is very much measured in, you know, tons of CO2 you remove from the air.

You know, it's both the business goal, revenue goal, and the impact goals are tightly aligned, right? Because we sell carbon removals. We sell carbon credits to the customers. So, you know, we have this goal to get to a billion tons a year in the 2030s. And, you know, that's going to essentially require us to make these facilities incredibly low cost, incredibly land efficient and, you know, copy and paste these million 10 per year facilities all across the world. That's Shishank Samala, co-founder and CEO of Airloom. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free.

This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with editing by John Isabella and research help from Carla Estevez. Our music was composed by Rumtine Arablui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This also includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, J.C. Howard. Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, Malia Agadello, Neva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.