Introduction
JACK ANDREASEN (00:00):
The focus should be on carbon dioxide and making sure, in your business practices, it doesn't hit the air. And for all of the CO2 molecules that you can't stop from hitting the air, you remove from the air. And if you want to call that a net zero target, great. If you want to call it something else internally, that's fine too. But I think at the end of the day, it's the carbon that matters.
ANNA STUKAS (00:20):
It's the absolute number of carbon molecules in the atmosphere.
JACK ANDREASEN (00:23):
Yep. That's the ball game.
ANNA STUKAS (24:00):
And it really just comes down to one plus negative one equals zero.
JACK ANDREASEN (00:28):
Yeah. Yeah. Math is...if the math maths, then it does.
ANNA STUKAS (00:34):
I love that.
ANNA STUKAS (00:45):
Hi. My name is Anna Stukas. I'm here in New York City with Jack Andreasen from Breakthrough Energy. Welcome to speaking in Tonnes.
The DAC Suit and Effective Communication
ANNA STUKAS (00:53):
Jack, thanks so much for joining us today. We're going to dive into a couple fun questions, get things started, with perhaps one of my favorite fashion pieces of all DAC-ness. You recently wore this DAC suit to DAC Day in 2024. How do you think a good communications and marketing strategy can really, even with fun things like the DAC suit, can pave the way for creating policy change?
JACK ANDREASEN (01:23):
Yeah, well, I mean, I first want to give a shout out to the Breakthrough Energy team, which gave me, gifted me this, DAC suit as a wedding gift. I own another Adidas track suit that I sort of wore, ironically, to a team retreat that we had and so they surprised me and my wife, Ryan, before a wedding with one. So, it's an incredible, piece of fashion. But I think, you know, from a practical standpoint, policy in and of itself is very dry. It's very focusing on nitty gritty details that most everyday folks will never come across. It will never be material to them unless they're seeing the consequences of that policy.
The DAC suit is deployed, tactically and strategically within my wardrobe, but I think it's a conversation starter. I had a number of people come up to me and they were like, “wow, I love this. Where did you get it? What, like, give me the backstory." And then from then you can have a very serious conversation, right? And you can sort of reiterate, like what your policy positions are, how critical you think it is.
I'm an eternal optimist. I will always be optimistic. I think human beings are incredible at driving change forward. As silly, you know, sort of as it is on its face, a track suit can be a physical manifestation of optimism.
ANNA STUKAS (02:37):
I love that. I think that piece about hope, it's so important. If you think that it's a fait accompli, that it's just all going to fail, then you're far less likely to take action. That need for optimism and hope, I think, is so important.
You often use social media to push back against things that you disagree with, particularly in the narratives around CDR, carbon dioxide removal, and direct air capture. Why do you feel it's important to engage in that way?
JACK ANDREASEN (03:08):
There are multiple avenues in which I like to push back. One is just factually incorrect information. I think, carbon management broadly, as a climate change solution, suffers from a history of poor PR and the unwillingness to defend itself publicly, around some of the just actually incorrect information out there. So that's like one avenue.
I think the second is education. My sort of greater background is in geologic storage of CO2. It's usually the first thing that comes up in conversations with folks about things that they're nervous about. Because it is, on its face, kind of wild to be able to take CO2 as a gas...and of course, you're pressurizing it to supercritical. But even when you say "supercritical" folks’ eyes sort of glaze over. What is that?
ANNA STUKAS (03:54):
They think it's scary, right?
JACK ANDREASEN (03:55):
Exactly. Supercritical is kind of a scary word. But when you're taking a gas and then you say, “oh, don't worry, we're going to we're going to drill a well, potentially, you know, 8,000 feet underground. And then we're going to pump gas into a rock.” That sounds wild. That sounds crazy.
ANNA STUKAS (04:11):
And people who I talk to often think that there's this giant balloon underground that you're pumping all this gas into. You're going to expand it like a balloon. And when you've got that image in your head, you start to worry that that balloon is going to pop at some point.
JACK ANDREASEN (04:26):
Yeah, exactly. And so, on the educational piece, like, I think this is so important because social media has a really wide reach. And if you can be viewed as like a trusted, good faith actor, it's an incredible communication tool, most importantly for carbon management, which is in dire need of positive communication.
Explaining DAC's Different Benefits to Different Audiences
ANNA STUKAS (04:44):
So, we talk about how you make this more real for people. How do you take something that's so esoteric as pulling carbon out of the air with basically a giant vacuum cleaner and putting it safely and securely deep underground? It's not a balloon. It's actually going into rocks just like this. When you talk about how you make things real and how you bring this to life for people what do you find most effective?
JACK ANDREASEN (05:08):
The first thing is like finding your audience, right? So, if I'm talking to somebody on the Hill or somebody, with the ability to, to affect policy, most of the time they're actually sort of less interested in the technology itself and more interested in the benefits that technology could bring, which is completely understandable, because policy at the end of the day has downstream effects to it.
And so direct air capture has as an incredible potential for economic development for jobs and local communities, as 1PointFive is evidence of, whether it's in STRATOS, whether it's in Kingsville with the South Texas DAC hub program. So, you know, when I'm talking to policymakers, we like to talk about what this means for their constituents, because at the end of the day, that's who they're beholden to. You know they're working on behalf of their voters. And when I'm talking to, sort of like the general public, analogies are really helpful because it is so abstract.
And so understanding the idea of, like, we're just going to take CO2 direct out of the air that we're breathing right now...very understanding. They get that. How to do it...I think, you know, the idea of a filter is very effective in the same way that like a BritaTM filter potentially in your fridge works by filtering out whatever sort of constituents are in your water. It's the same idea, we're just filtering out CO2. And then once we've filtered out the CO2, you know, when you put it underground, I think the best analogy is a sponge. You can think of rocks, although we see them as these sort of hard physical substances, which they are... The way CO2 interacts with it is much more like water into a sponge.
And then, you know, the next question is like, you know, when you take a sponge and you wring it out, what then happens to the CO2 in this analogy? And I say, yeah, now imagine you buried a sponge 8,000 feet underground and you've got that much earth on top of it. The water is just not going to go back up. That’s just not how physics work. And so, I think through using analogies that people can really grapple with, it’s effective.
ANNA STUKAS (07:12):
Helps them to wrap their heads around it. I mean, we also we get the question of, "don't we need CO2?" Like plants need CO2. It's like, well, yes, you need some CO2, but not too much CO2. I actually just this morning likened it to, you're trying to sleep in the middle of the summer, but with a really thick down blanket on. Like we put a big heavy blanket on the earth.
JACK ANDREASEN (07:32):
Yeah, absolutely. I come from a family farm in Nebraska and, my uncles will say well, you know, frequently heard...isn't CO2 plant food? Which of course it is. That is very true. And it is also true that the production of vegetation can go up with increasing CO2 levels. But there's also a lot of negative consequences that come for humanity with increases in CO2 levels. And that's what we're really trying to balance.
The Role of Government: Prices and Standards
ANNA STUKAS (07:58):
What can government do or what role can government play in the long-term growth of carbon dioxide removal?
JACK ANDREASEN (08:05):
Governments, first and foremost, can help set a price for what carbon looks like. And there's a number of different policies that they can do with that. But also, and maybe more importantly, government needs to set quality standards. We've seen challenges in the voluntary carbon market with what constitutes a real carbon credit. What is a real project? And real to me means the CO2 is removed.
You can tell whether that CO2 is where you removed it. You can monitor where that CO2 is over time. And then you know that, that whole process is able to be verified by somebody. When you have this, two-pronged approach of, in some areas, setting a price or saying or a de facto price on carbon, and then also setting quality and saying what good CDR is, then you can allow companies and technology providers to come in and meet both of those at a price and at a standard that is set. And then you have competition thrive, pushing prices lower, while keeping the standards the same and rigorous.
ANNA STUKAS (09:11):
Right. That’s setting the example for what good looks like.
JACK ANDREASEN (09:15):
Yeah, absolutely.
ANNA STUKAS (09:16):
And then you can see everybody looking to that. Not going to lie, my favorite climate policy is the low carbon fuel standards.
JACK ANDREASEN (09:22):
It's a great piece of policy.
ANNA STUKAS (09:24):
It's also one of my favorite interview questions. What is your favorite climate policy?
JACK ANDREASEN (09:30):
I mean, my favorite climate policy for sure is, in my world it’s 45Q. I mean, it's the most important piece of policy when you look at carbon management projects actually getting announced. When you have a dedicated revenue stream of at least 12 years, that's real finance-ability, that's real bankability, that sort of support gets projects built.
ANNA STUKAS (09:54):
We saw the U.S. Department of Energy come out earlier this year and really challenge private companies to follow its lead on purchasing high-quality carbon dioxide removal. What kind of public-private partnerships do you think can be beneficial to the goals of emissions reduction and carbon removal?
JACK ANDREASEN (10:12):
When you look towards private industry, one thing they can do very well is move fast, and they can move relatively large amounts of capital pretty quickly. When you have again, government setting the standard, that gives companies the ability to go out and say, “okay, well, we have a billion to spend on this, we're going to use U.S. government standards for this, and you have to meet that in order to reach procurement for us.”
That's very powerful. And then, what they did with the purchasing prize in the matching dollar amounts is fantastic. I mean, that's kind of the goal, right, is to be able to say, “all right, taxpayer for every one dollar you put in, we get three dollars of private capital, we get $5 of private capital.”
ANNA STUKAS (10:53):
Yeah, force multiplier effect. Yeah. And as a taxpayer, it makes me happy to see the government is spending money responsibly and seeing private corporations coming to the table and putting their money where their mouth is.
JACK ANDREASEN (11:06):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in particular, direct air capture is not cheap to build. These are billion-dollar facilities. You can't greenwash your way out of putting steel in the ground on a billion-dollar facility. That's just not how that works.
The Urgency to Act Now
ANNA STUKAS (11:18):
You know, we often hear, less so today, but I think in the early days of carbon removal, we heard a lot of talk about the moral hazard. Well, if you can just clean it up afterward, then there won't be the pressure or the imperative to reduce emissions. But in fact, we need all of the above. We need to reduce, we need to reuse, we need to recycle, and we need to remove. We need the full gamut.
JACK ANDREASEN (11:39):
Yeah. So, we need every tool in the toolkit. I mean, we're already behind on every target that we've set out to hit. It doesn't make any sense to me to limit the amount of tools that you have. Even if we were to get down and be able to reduce all the way to zero, which would be great, legacy emissions are real use-case for CDR. We need it now. We need to yesterday. And we're going to need it going forward for historic emissions, too.
ANNA STUKAS (12:04):
Absolutely. And we can't just snap our fingers in 2049 and magically have billions of tons of carbon removal appear in time for net zero in 2050.
JACK ANDREASEN (12:13):
These technologies are complex. They take a lot of research and development, and perfectly said, you can't just snap your fingers and these become real at scale in 2050.
ANNA STUKAS (12:24):
Do you think that a net zero target in particular is something that companies should be striving for or putting together, or is there a better metric?
JACK ANDREASEN (12:37):
The focus should be on carbon dioxide and making sure, in your business practices, it doesn't hit the air. And for all of the CO2 molecules that you can't stop from hitting the air, you remove from the air. And if you want to call that a net-zero target, great. If you want to call it something else internally, that's fine too. But I think at the end of the day, it's the carbon that matters.
ANNA STUKAS (12:58):
Yeah. It's the absolute number of carbon molecules in the atmosphere.
JACK ANDREASEN (13:01):
Yep. That's the ball game.
ANNA STUKAS (13:02):
And it really just comes down to one plus negative one equals zero.
JACK ANDREASEN (13:06):
Yeah. Yeah. Math is if the math maths, then it does.
Those Who Need Removals Today and Long-Term Partnership
ANNA STUKAS (13:14):
What do we need to use carbon removal for? Are there places where maybe we should use carbon removal sooner than later?
JACK ANDREASEN (13:23):
Yeah, absolutely. Carbon removal is sort of the last resort of things. And that's just pure physics, because removing carbon out of the ambient air is very difficult. It's thermodynamically incredibly inefficient. And yet we have to do it. And so then you look at industries where we just don't have cost competitive alternatives at the moment. And so, for things like aviation, carbon dioxide removal makes sense right now.
These emissions that we have planes, the agricultural sector, some deep industrial sectors like plastics for example, where the alternative to doing this, the clean version of doing this, the…the non-emitting way of doing this is so expensive right now that CDR is actually the cheapest way, at least for the moment, to decarbonize. And where that is true, we should do it.
ANNA STUKAS (14:08):
What's one piece of advice that you would give to companies that are developing carbon removal and DAC technologies to communicate their vision to potential buyers?
JACK ANDREASEN (14:20):
If you're going to sell carbon removal to any buyer, the first thing is to communicate the certainty of the CO2 molecule. Run it from the moment it's taken from the air, to the moment it's locked away. So being able to communicate across technical boundaries is really key. And then understanding it's a partnership. You're not just selling them a removal and then saying, “hey, see you later” walking out the door and that's it. This is a partnership that you need to nurture throughout the entirety of this. Because when their CO2 molecule gets removed, if you're doing geologic storage in rocks like in STRATOS, that's going to stay, in the supercritical phase for hundreds, potentially thousands of years until it turns back into stone.
That means their asset, the CO2 they bought, is with you for hundreds to thousands of years. And that relationship is really important. To make sure that as you communicate exactly how you're going to do what you do in a way that they can understand, they also realize that this is a commitment that they're making, not just to you as the technology provider, as the as the removal person of the CO2, not just as a commitment to climate that they're making here, but, a commitment that will be honored for a thousand years. And that is a sort of relationship-building that I think, companies can get behind, because at the end of the day, companies want certainty.
ANNA STUKAS (15:50):
Awesome, I love that. Thank you so much, Jack, for spending time with us today. Really, really appreciate it. And, just a delight, as always, to chat with you.
JACK ANDREASEN (16:00):
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's been awesome.
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