SIO402: How Biden's Climate Legislation Is Making A Difference

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 402. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and today, know, as much as I am horrendously disappointed in how Biden has responded to the Israel -Hamas conflict, it is also true that he's done some pretty amazing, amazing things and gets little to no credit for them. And today's episode is about one or two of those things. May have heard last year when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act that it was the most aggressive climate change bill in American history.

That's good, that good that Democrats passed that, by obviously the narrowest of margins. Of course, the minute you try to tout any accomplishment like that, the first response is, "But it's not enough." But it is not enough. And it's like, yeah, no, no, I get it. It also has to pass Congress. Won' t go on. More progressive legislation through Congress is to elect more progressive people to Congress and have a larger and larger majority such that the swing senator or swing house rep is more progressive.

And only then can you get more progressive regulation. But even still, this is, is actually quite impressive given who we needed as, like, the swing votes. Today's expert has some direct experience with some of the effects of the bill, choosing to remain a bit anonymous just because of job reasons.

Again, his name is Donald, and he's here to talk about carbon capture and some of those technologies that I certainly don't know that much about, and done, and is trying to do and is planning to do in the future to encourage these industries and improvements in technology and utilization, all these things that, you, you chip away to enough of these, start to look like genuinely on the problem of climate change. That's today's expert. I'm excited to get over to it.

Before I do, I'll just say, if you don't want to hear the really annoying auto ad that you're about to hear, go to patreon.com/seriouspod. Also find there a little thread where you can ask questions of the future experts coming on kind of before the show happens. Lydia posts those, a lot of fun. Also the Hangout that do every month. So that's going, fun, can't wait. We may incorporate other games, but we have lots more Codenames to play, so can't wait for that.

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It is Seriously Awful Movies 3: Good Will Hunting, so that's also on patreon.com/seriouspod, all good reasons, plus you can support Lydia and I making shows, doing stuff, working hard, we hope you appreciate it, and we really appreciate you, so thank you so much. And with that said, let's hear an annoying ad, unless you're one of the amazing people who doesn't have to hear those. I'm joined by Donald, and that's all we're going to say about you. You were going to stay semi -anonymous here. How are you doing today?

0:03:25 Donald: Good, I'm good. Thanks out to have me on. It's going to be great.

0:03:27 Thomas: Oh, absolutely. Thanks for filling out the form. As always, something I've really wanted to talk about for a long time, don't know where to begin, but why don't we start with as much as you care to say, you know, if you can't say, about your background and uh, and this kind of topic. Yeah.

0:03:41 Donald: Have, yeah. A PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley. Been working in industry for about 27 years now, and the last five years really on this whole carbon management problem. So, you know, happy to about CO2 goals, CO2 options, especially electricity generation sector. Um.

0:03:58 Thomas: Um, amazing. With all that's going on in the world, there's a lot. It's time you're like, "gosh, then there's this and there's just, there's Gaza, there's, you know, there's the Israel war, there's, you know, this is the, is there's... there's are we gonna let Trump back in office," you know, that's gonna be a whole nother fucking thing. And then every time, in the back of my mind, I'm also like, "oh yeah, also, is the world ending in five minutes? How's that going?" There's a lot to keep track of. Been wanting to do more on climate change in general, but it's-ranging topic. Do you want to give us a little bit of a current state of things there? I seem like I hear nothing but bad news. It feels like we had these targets for, it's 1.5 or 2 or whatever it was, and then I keep seeing reports that, yeah, we're not going to meet any of those kind of things. So what can you tell us about that? How worried should we be, at all times?

0:04:44 Donald: I think, I think we should be pretty, we concerned. Um, you know, we're not on, we're to meet, you know, the most ambitious um 1.5 degrees increase goals by 2050. We may still have a shot at at two degrees, but um, know, we continue to pump out more and more carbon every year. And, you know, in the United States, we've done better than some other places. We actually, of course, we're completely electrified and everything. So our, our carbon emissions have actually come down since 2000. The rest of the world tends to be going up. China, there's some rumors out there that China may actually hit peak um emissions next year, which would be awesome, because they put out twice as much CO2 as we do. Yeah. And So

0:05:27 Thomas: Oh, wow. What about, I mean, is that because of population or is there, you know, the per population kind of per capita metric too?

0:05:29 Donald: Yeah. Well. So, per capita, they're actually much, much lower than than we are. Um, some of the countries that are, have the worst um capita, are, you know, like the oil rich countries, countries of East. They a lot of fossil fuels, and they're actually not that populated. They're very hot. They a lot air conditioning. So yeah, China is just a huge population, but they're in terms of electrifying their population. They're also very big into nuclear energy, as and solar.

0:05:45 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, hmm. Good. Yeah that's, I'm a huge fan of nuclear. It sucks that we're just Just not taking advantage of that, it feels like.

0:06:05 Donald: Is something that, um, pushing, pushing as well. Wind and solar are great, nuclear needs to be a piece of that, and then, um, capture, um, also part of the equation.

0:06:12 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, that feels pretty, I, and again, you're not like a climate scientist per se, and that's something, you know, somebody I'd love to talk to as, but it also feels like there's so many feedback loops that are, you know, negative feedback loops of just like, well, once the glaciers start melting, then they're not reflecting as much sunlight.

And then this, like, it just seems like it gets out of hand so fast that I'm constantly feeling like if I think about it too much, it's going to ruin my day. And I don't know what to do. You know, it's such a large problem.

But maybe, I know there are a lot of people, I think could be, who knows how many people this is, who are just assuming there's going to be some technological solution at some point, you know, that we're going to just be constantly on edge and it's going to be really bad. And then there will be some ding. Oh, we fixed it. We got, there's a new iPhone app, actually, that just takes care of the carbon. So that's kind of more where you come in, right? How's your app development going?

0:07:06 Donald: We're working on it, yeah. The, don't foresee any, uh, magical fixes at the, the of the road. I, I'm more concerned that, you know, 10 years from now we're going to start to, um, know mitigation strategies that we are going to have to live on a hotter planet, we're going to live to on a planet that's just going to have higher sea levels and different weather patterns than we're used to, and a lot of work will have to go into how do you plan to have nine billion people live on, uh, on a Earth, um.

0:07:33 Thomas: -Hmm.

0:07:33 Donald: So. That's not something that I'm super excited for my kids to have to manage. Um, but, uh, you, if we don't move more quickly, uh, you know, that's probably where the, the research will start to turn is mitigation, mitigation. Um, the good news is, um, you know, the recently passed legislation in the United States, um, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the, um, Act Act, both are huge climate bills, so.

0:07:33 Thomas: Yeah. Mm. -Hm, yeah.

0:07:58 Donald: The Green New Deal did not get passed, but large sections of the Green New Deal, especially with respect to, uh, and electrification, are in those, uh, those bills, so. There's a great incentive, and I think even the EU has recognized that the United, United States has now become a leader in policy around carbon mitigation.

0:08:09 Thomas: Oh.

0:08:18 Thomas: Cool, it must have been Trump and, uh, all the Republicans who did that, right? Yeah.

0:08:22 Donald: Think I think they were like eight, 10 Republicans in the Senate that voted for the bipartisan law. So that's about it.

0:08:25 Thomas: Yeah. And. And I know the, the first, first response from everybody will be, it's not enough, and it's like, yeah, I know, we all know it's not enough, that's literally, we all know that there's. No, I don't know. Does. Anyone think it's enough? I don't think anyone thinks it's enough. I do know that if.

0:08:35 Donald: Yeah. No, it's a, it'S no.

0:08:41 Thomas: We let the other guy back in, then it's going to be negative, that whatever it is will be reversed and made a hundred times worse. And I know that's bad. So that's. The political angle on it.

0:08:50 Donald: Yeah, Would be bad. That would be bad. Absolutely. There's. There's.

0:08:53 Thomas: Now that we've covered the

0:08:55 Donald: No doubt, yep.

0:08:55 Thomas: Political science of the whole topic. Yeah. Remember, you lot of people were very happy about, again, acknowledging why it's not enough, but like about the progress in that bill. Can you tell us a little bit more about the details of those incentives? Like, why has that been so effective, do you think?

0:09:10 Donald: Yep, I, I dive into the, the exact incentives, I, I want to back up and talk, and about the different forms of carbon capture. And, and other options for decarbonizing the, the power generation sector, um, and in one sense, carbon capture can be done, um, a at a power plant, coal at or a gas plant. And you basically have to build a large scrubber on the back end of the power plant, and this is commercial technology today that people sell to remove CO2. No one does it at a full scale power plant, it's done at some and smaller scales. That technology exists and is getting improved upon. When people say carbon capture, that's, that's thing they think about.

0:09:17 Thomas: Sure. Right.

0:09:52 Donald: Then that can also be done at cement plants, concrete, ethanol plants, they all put out a lot of CO2 and this, capture technology expensive, but it can be done. Other field of what be called carbon capture, and that has to do with what is actually carbon dioxide removal. So that's actually taking carbon dioxide that's already been put into the air and it.

0:10:10 Thomas: Right, right. Good distinction, because that was actually what I had in mind the whole time when you were. I forgot. Yeah, there's also the just kind of at the source. Do you have any quick, you of like what portion of the problem is what you talking about, you know, OK, coal power plants, I have no indication of like what portion of the problem that is.

0:10:34 Donald: So and for For the U.S., that's primarily coal and natural gas, is about 35% of global carbon emissions every year. Sector of carbon emissions.

0:10:44 Thomas: Oh, wow. Of the whole world is our our coal.

0:10:47 Donald: No, sorry, sorry. No, and national gas across the world represents – There's world, there are other electricity technologies, even just biomass and and products to make electricity, we primarily just burn natural gas and coal, but overall, uh, electricity sector is 35% of the problem. So if you started to put carbon capture on those, you start to make a huge dent in in the total emissions.

0:10:48 Thomas: Oh, Across the world. Gotcha. Mm hmm.

0:11:10 Thomas: Mm hmm, how efficient can those be? I imagine you put a big coffee filter over the whole plant and just kind of catches all that.

0:11:18 Donald: A – think about it as the comes out of the combustion. You essentially bubble it through a liquid, and that liquid will strip out the dioxide. And then you have to take that liquid and drive the CO2 off. It's an expensive process. Process, it would add to the electricity price, probably 10, 20%. It would make the electricity 10, 20% more expensive.

0:11:25 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:11:43 Donald: So That's the reason that we don't do it today is because, or we haven't done it in the past, I should say, is because you make yourself uncompetitive. So if you've got a gas plant that captures carbon and you have a gas plan that doesn't capture carbon, and the electricity price is 20% higher for the clean one, you they don't they don't get worked.

0:11:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hold on. Hold on. But I learned Economics in business school. What will happen is the it. So the companies that don's capture, they'll destroy the planet and then the customers will go to a different planet that only has the ones that do do it, and that's the invisible hand of the market. No, this sounds like something that, you know, the market isn't going to fucking fix, because for one, the is not captured in the price. So like the cost of destroying the planet is not reflected in the prize. So when we see this like effort to fix that, and it just costs money and adds money, we're like, well, that sucks. We don't like adding money to stuff. But if we could somehow have the actual cost reflected in price, then the market maybe could figure it out, but that's just not gonna happen. So I feel like this is something the government needs to say, hey, everybody must do this, and then we'll figure it from there.

0:12:03 Donald: Yeah. Yes.

0:12:50 Donald: And, and the way the government should do it, is you, you're exactly right, is you put a price on that pollution, and you know, classic carbon tax, um, government, even the current government, you know, does not like talk about taxes, and so what, what they've done instead is they've created tax credits. And so I'll get to that in a second. I do want to talk a little bit about the other types of carbon capture where you can pull it out of the air.

0:13:16 Donald: That also breaks down into different ways, right? I mean you can – in theory, you can plant trees.

0:12:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, I've got this technology. It's called trees. Those have got to be pretty good at it.

0:13:23 Donald: Yeah, yeah, trees. It is. Pretty good, and they're pretty cheap. And if you look into like what some big companies have done in the past, Microsoft and Google often publish what carbon offsets they've purchased, and they do like purchase carbon offs, that's every year. The vast majority of those in the past, at least, have gone to forests, some type of forest. The problem with that is, and and they're starting to be it up in the press on this, is that it's not clear how long, long-term that is.

0:13:53 Donald: Trees take, you a long time to grow. They eventually will die and decay and or they will burn up in a forest fire. So that's considered a permanent way of capturing carbon.

0:13:53 Thomas: Yeah, right.

0:14:03 Thomas: I'm pretty sure there's all kinds of gaming in the system, I imagine, because it's fucking capitalism. So it'll be like, wow, that tree was already going to be there anyway, and you're kind of dumb. So there's a lot of that crap. But the principle of of let's plant a trillion trees is at least like scientifically sound, right?

0:14:06 Donald: Yeah, I mean, it could I mean it would work. Long-term, I just don't know. Is you can actually, similar to how you do for the know, at the gas plant or point source, is you can have an engineered solution where you blow across a chemical formulation that has specificity for removing CO2 from the air. And CO2 in the air is very low concentration, relatively speaking. But these technologies can that. And in in the bipartisan infrastructure law, there was $3.5 billion in that law to establish four of these direct air capture or DAC, I'm going to say the word DAC a lot, direct air recapture hubs, hubs. And so that they recently announced the first winners of those hubs, and I don't know if you, the New York Times earlier this week, or maybe it was last week, um, ran a story about the first direct air capture facility coming up in America. So in Iceland that run off geothermal, I think there's one in Canada, small, small scale, very small scale.

0:14:38 Thomas: Right. Sure. Yeah.

0:15:21 Donald: But a in California just put in the U.S. direct air capture facility.

0:15:26 Thomas: So let's back up. So yeah, the principle, obviously it's almost like, I feel like my four six -year -old could offer this solution of, well, there's a bunch of crap in the air that's bad and we need it out. Can we just like, you know, vacuum clean it? Is there some way to just do it. What are the challenges? I think you already mentioned, I mean, it's just the fact that like on the whole, this stuff does obviously immense harm in the form of, you capturing heat and retaining heat, but relative to like per, you whatever of air, a volume of air.

It's, it'S very, it' sparse. It's not like it' that must be a challenge, right? And trying to pull it out per You can tell me the actual terms of the parts per million of something or whatever is, is so thin that it's like hard to grab. What, can you give me a sense of the scale? You said they've set up a few of these now. How efficient are those? How good are they? What do they do? Are they, it to like, if you planted a bunch of trees in a spot, what's actually better?

0:15:38 Donald: Yeah. Yeah, yep.

0:16:22 Donald: So, and I think that goes to the question of, okay, once you've captured the CO2, what are you going to do with it, right?

0:16:27 Thomas: Yeah. I was assuming that part.

0:16:30 Donald: You so you have trees, you know where the carbon is, right. When you capture carbon in a machine and Then you you regenerate the materials that captured the CO2, and so now you've you captured the co -two Um, people are, now we're going to the first things that are going to be done is to put it underground, is to store it in geologic storage. So you create high pressure, very dense CO2, and you pump it underground, over a mile down, below the water table, into specific geological formations that have holes, that have pores in them that this CO2 can fill. And so now

0:16:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:03 Thomas: It's like a slightly technologically more advanced version of a landfill then, I guess, like it's, is it a gas, though, is it like a really dense gas, or does it take some other form

0:17:14 Donald: You're going to ask me the geeky science question Because CO2 is a very interesting material, and a supercritical state, and that's the state it is. So liquid it's not or a gas. So what it is is it has the density of a liquid, but it fills the space like a gas, so, no, it's just hyperdense first.

0:17:35 Thomas: Wow. I didn't know that, just normally, or do you mean when it's this hyper dense version Oh. Gotcha.

0:17:41 Donald: And know, CO2 is naturally a gas at, And you can also, you can cool it down and you can get a, obviously, dry ice, right? That's carbon dioxide. So dry ice is a solid.

0:17:42 Thomas: Gotcha. Sure. Okay. Oh. That'll Cool the planet, here we go, now we've got, replace the ice caps with dry ice. There we go, yeah.

0:18:00 Donald: Yeah. And obviously the great thing about dry ice is it doesn't go through a liquid phase. So right at room temperature, it just goes straight gas. To So you don't have a messy water, you know, like ice.

0:18:06 Thomas: But Is That Worse. Because then it's just back in the atmosphere. Yeah. But Is, so when we talk about the challenges of being not very much parts per million or whatever, does that kind of turn into an advantage when you're trying to store it, because it's like, well, if you're condensing it down like that, does it end up not being physically very much, or is that wrong?

0:18:13 Donald: Well, no, it's bad. Yeah. So, no.

0:18:30 Thomas: Okay. So That's Wrong. Darn.

0:18:29 Donald: It's still gigatons of materials that you have to, yeah, you have to, so you pump it down to this special state that is easy to transport and easy to store. It's called supercritical CO2 and it's this semi -gas, semi -liquid phase. Phase. And it will stay underground. The research has been done 100 plus years, probably more. It may also undergo some chemical reactions with the surrounding rocks to actually turn into solids. So it Will stay down there. And there are a few wells in the United States that have done this successfully.

14 were just announced, again, law to have more sites come online. So they're the problem from all sides, source, direct air capture, and storage, transportation and storage, the $3.5 billion. They've distributed about billion of that in this first round, um, those are, uh, to be starting soon, um, then in the Inflation Reduction Act, because there, there's no incentive, there's no monetary incentive to actually capture carbon, they created these tax credits. So if you're doing point source capture, you can get, uh, $85 a ton tax credit, and if you can't use that tax credit for some reason, you can sell it. So

0:18:34 Thomas: That'd Be, be nice. Right.

0:19:52 Thomas: Right, right, nice.

0:19:52 Donald: That's, that's really good, and then for the direct air capture, which is harder, it's $180 a ton tax credit, and in this case they've changed the rules this time around, is that not only can you sell that tax credit, if, if you're a non-profit, or a, or municipality, or tribal organization, you, you can actually get a direct pay. They'll

0:20:11 Thomas: An Amazon gift card, they'll give You, yeah, yeah. Cool. And I imagine there's some, obviously there's a pretty basic calculation of, here's how much, since you have a money per, the, or whatever you said, you, here's how much this is budgeted to do. If everybody took advantage of it and maxed out the program, what is that, is that a good, is it, how much will that do? Will that help?

0:20:12 Donald: Exactly. Yep. Yep, yep.

0:20:32 Donald: That's a really great question because the, the law as it's written has no cap on this tax credit.

0:20:33 Thomas: Oh, okay. Feel like the US government doesn't work that way, though, does it?

0:20:42 Donald: Well, you couple know, of things that is limited. So, So you ground by 2032, the tax credit only goes 12 years.

0:20:51 Donald: Direct air capture, it's not quite enough to to get you into economics, especially for a first of a kind kind of installation. So what's happened instead, in addition, not that a number of companies the Microsofts and the Googles and the Stripes have stepped up and have uh pre-purchased or or promised to purchase uh credits um from these facilities at, you know, not 180 a ton but like 600 a ton. So they've been willing to put in you lot more money per ton because they recognize that 180 today is not economical, maybe in the future it will be but not today. So, yeah, were two direct air capture hubs that were given the most money.

They're the most far along, and as soon as those were announced, um, think both Microsoft and Google announced that they are buying credits from those groups. Um, and so that's a way for this to for take off, is you voluntary market. Now, how big is that voluntary market? Nobody knows. Everybody worries about it, you know, is know it one -off There's a bad economic year and Google and Microsoft go away. You But to meet climate their goals, you know, corporate set climate goals, you types of carbon credits are going to be, are going needed, and really going to need it in sectors that are very hard to to decarbonize. And one of the ones that um with a lot or think about a lot is the aviation industry. So, you know, there's talk of using different technologies to fly planes, but at the end of the day, petroleum products, jet

0:21:08 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah,

0:22:21 Donald: Fuel is very, very energy dense. There's a whole, you know, all the engines are designed for it. You know, you can talk about maybe hybridizing it with some batteries, or there's even talk about using hydrogen, but those are all very, very hard, and it would be much easier just to buy a credit to offset your emissions from aviation. Um,

0:22:21 Thomas: Jet fuel. Yeah?

0:22:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:43 Thomas: Or I guess, you know, I mean, I guess as much as it sucks, if we grappled with the full extent of the problem we're facing, once again, Again, I mean, it may be that flight should just be really, really, really expensive. It would suck. I wouldn't get to go anywhere. But, you know, or there'd be some way to manage that with government, you know offsets or incentives or something. But yeah, like it might be that flying is just something that's really, really bad for the planet and need the cost needs to reflect that.

0:23:10 Donald: It's interesting, um, about the airlines. First of all, the airlines, uh, at least in the open literature, want to buy credits. They have a different strategy, which I'll talk about in a second, but are also, they have the belief that any increase in cost is a detriment to the economy, that so much of the economy is tied up in you kind of speedy travel, whether it's packages, packages or um, um, any cost increase, you has know a knock -on effect, um, the whole economy. Um, have a another solution that they are pushing for, and that is, um, if you can take CO2 out of the air using like direct air capture, and you can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, you you can then combine CO2 and hydrogen to recreate fuels. You

0:23:33 Thomas: Yeah. Hey,

0:24:06 Donald: Can literally take water from the air, which you wouldn't want to do, that's too expensive, but it's kind of nice to think about water from hair and CO2 from the hair and make, um, yeah, like methanol, ethanol, even higher alkanes.

0:24:19 Thomas: But What? Okay, is why is this, their, are they doing this on the fucking planes? Like, why is there a specific strategy, you know, like, okay.

0:24:27 Donald: So, so that would be, if you did it that way, it would be a carbon neutral fuel, so you wouldn't do it on a plane, right. You would set up a chemical, you'd set up at direct air capture facility, and then a chemical plant that takes that CO2, and instead of sticking it in the ground, like I said before, is that you actually reuse it, and

0:24:46 Thomas: So I guess my question is, why, if this was a good viable idea, wouldn't people already be doing that anyway? Like, like, if it's not particular to, like, the airplane is somehow doing it, wouldn't somebody else just be like, I've got this great way to make fuel that I can then sell, and I'll use these government incentives that probably would count for it?

0:25:04 Donald: Centers count, the problem is, is it's still too expensive. So it goes back to this whole cost thing again, right. Jet fuel is three bucks a gallon. If you fuel made this way today is $14 a gallon. Um, need not only massive government incentives, but you also need improved technology, improved chemistry, uh, carbon capture, uh, direct air capture. So all these things are on a technological path to get cheaper, but also you need to fight the policy side, because they're never going to be as cheap as you a subsidized fossil fuel industry.

0:25:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Those friggin' dinosaurs, man. They just made such good jet fuel. I don't know why they had to do that.

0:25:42 Donald: They do they do And also, I should say that, um, hydrogen in this way, making hydrogen from water, splitting it in electrolyzers, is also subsidized in the IRA bill to the tune of $3 a kilogram. So it so both sides of the equate of that, of this e -fuels equation, which is what this really is, it's a it's called e -fuel is really subsidized on both sides, and that's that fuel in California gets an additional subsidy as well. Um, a bit, so I'm sure that the first fuels will actually go not to airplanes, because first of all, there's a lot of regulations, regulations around, around the fuel you put into a jet plane. It takes a long time to get over that, but you can make a diesel, you can Make an E diesel much easier and there's a lot less regulation around it. And California will pay a ton for that. And so you can actually, you know, you can have a process that's, maybe that's. $10 a gallon, but by the time it gets to to California, it's three or four with all the subsidies.

0:25:56 Thomas: Oh. Sure. Yeah. Hmm. Is that better than just making electric cars, though? Oop.

0:26:43 Donald: Maybe, not. But you know, Elon gets his truck working, I think we're going to need liquid fuels for long haul

0:26:53 Thomas: So like applications, customer, electric vehicles not working quite well enough yet for like, you or whatever you're saying that people might be more likely to take on this technology.

0:27:02 Donald: It was cost and can make – – especially if you're a company, you've got a fleet of trucks. You can claim that they're clean. I mean that's what Frito-Lay was trying to do with buying those first Elon trucks that came off the line. PR. Don't hear great things about those trucks, but that's it.

0:27:13 Thomas: Yeah. Now, you're not talking about the Cybertruck. You're talking about actual, he made a semi -truck.

0:27:20 Donald: I'm not – yeah, I'm talking about the Cybertruck. He made a semi. I, yep, and and Frito-Lay bought like 50 of them or something, and um, they've been having some uh, not not not reliability is still still working on that still working

0:27:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to another, even though, you know, I drive a Tesla, I love having an electric car. I hate Elon Musk and I look forward to other companies doing a better job later that are catching up that, you Know, so we'll see. Okay.

0:27:43 Donald: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so there's whole uh, up left and right to do all of these things, um, do direct air capture, to do hydrogen production, to do e-fuels. And the government's putting, um, fair bit of not just these incentives, but the Department of Energy has, you, the way from basic research programs all the away to, um, know massive loans to, um, plants, uh, the way so they, the part of energy is really um stepped up. And in fact, I don't know, so this is an interesting little side, so with with the change of administrations, the Department of Energy had an office called Fossil Energy. And for years, Fossil Energy was really focused on keeping coal plants open.

0:28:26 Donald: Joe Manchin sits on the committee that sets the budget for the Department of Energy. Anyway, Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, so since this change of administration, they changed their name to Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. They do lot in the carbon management space to some of these problems and to get money into the research and into the industry community to these problems. So it's a good time to be in the industry. Will say, though, that these technologies technologies are not without controversy, um, is significant backlash to these carbon capture technologies, both at point source and direct air capture, and the argument is that you successful use of these technologies will keep fossil fuels flowing.

0:28:25 Thomas: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

0:29:05 Thomas: I was gonna ask that. I mean, I think, how big of a problem is that? I mean, I guess we have the one benefit is that they're not making new dinosaurs. So, like, eventually it should get to the point where we, we run out of these, or at least they get so inefficient to pull out, you know, that we stop using them, but I don't know when that is. Yeah.

0:29:06 Donald: Yeah and then you, there's this concept called peak oil, that is basically saying, okay, we have, uh, reached the maximum amount of oil that we can extract per year, and it's going to have to come down, and what, where that peak is, and when it is, continues to get pushed out every year as we find more more oil, technology improves, we can access deeper and get and more and more out of of the earth. So, I don't know, uh, eventually it has to be limited, it has to be finite for sure, um, I don't know that we have a really good handle on on how finite that is. I think

0:29:39 Thomas: Yeah pretty soon they will invent a way to first make more dinosaurs, put them in the ground, turn them into fossils, then drill them back up again. Like, we'll see, the fossil fuel industry, it feels pretty resilient, there's always new bullshit, shit, right?

0:30:08 Donald: Yeah, yeah, but anyway, so there is that controversy that, you know, if you have a point source, you're burning natural gas, and now you're capturing most of the CO2, well, you're still extracting natural gas from the earth, and, you know, that's, there's not without its own greenhouse gas concerns, just a very extraction of natural gas is is not great. Oh, then director captures the same thing, is that people will just, oh, buy your credits, and they're gonna pay pay to keep burning fossil fuels, and so, you know, that doesn't solve the problem, um,

0:30:28 Thomas: Right.

0:30:38 Thomas: I mean, presumably, if we're in control of kind of the numbers involved there, then you can make that work. I mean, obviously, if, if, uh, such that, like, "oh, this isn't actually reducing the carbon footprint or whatever," you know, the total carbon, then obviously the incentives would have to change to to make the numbers work. Yeah.

0:30:54 Donald: Yes. Yes, are lot of initiatives to make sure that the things that are being done actually do reduce this, you know, the CO2 footprint, especially, you know, we talk about making e-fuels, um, a rigorous methodology to go through to prove that, through through all of those processes, that, let's say, methanol or ethanol that you get out at the end actually has a significantly lower life cycle carbon footprint than just the normal way of doing it, so that you are actually making an impact. Delta, right? You can't say it's all carbon-free. You have to, you know, it's some percentage carbon-free. So, I want to also quickly highlight you that the IRA bill also has incentives extended and enhanced incentives for solar, wind, and nuclear. Some, know, some you get a tax credit when you build, some you get a tax credit when you produce, and it all makes you know those know things more cost competitive, existing technology, uh,

0:31:28 Thomas: Yeah, uh, What's practical if, if you, with what you know, could wave a magic wand, and let's say the easy, it seems like the best solution would be, let's just change the kinds of fuels we burn and, you know, change that over to nuclear and wind and solar and all that stuff. But, um, talking about the capture side, if if you were able to just dictate policy and spend, you know, unending money, how much could be accomplished there? Like, could you set up enough facilities, or whatever, enough technologies of carbon capture to really make a massive difference and actually not maybe not just like stop this problem, but actually repair some of the damage? Is that possible, like scientifically? Yeah?

0:32:32 Donald: I mean, in theory, yes. I mean, it, magic wand, or the, you know, the 20, the near term ideal would be, especially, well, I thinking about the US particularly as we get rid all the coal plants that we have and either convert them to natural gas or just shut them down. And, um, that we really, um, the permitting process for the next generation of nuclear reactors, um, not close ones that are working fine, I, I hear now that they're going to keep, uh, canyon open out in California, was slated to to close, I think, um, stability, you're going to some flexibility, and I think that's where you're gonna have gas turbines with carbon capture that will be able to respond to loads.

How many of those do we need? Going to depend on how much nuclear we're able to get in onto the grid, because for every nuclear plant that we don't have, we're going to need another gas plant, um, you know, at some point, like, for example, you know, right now you wind and solar and hydro make up about 20 percent of our electricity grid in the United States, that could easily double, um, we would still have, um, know a lot of of load, um, that needs to be filled in, so, you know, wind and solar are not reliable, uh, can put some batteries in there, it's very expensive, still not going to give you that reliability that you need, um, going to need something like a nuclear plant or a gas plant that you use occasionally to really, um, the grid resilient, um, I don't know how much that is, but it's it's billions and billions of dollars, and it will only come about, you know, with more more aggressive incentives. And I would say more aggressive penalties, go back to a carbon tax would be where I would go.

0:32:43 Thomas: So

0:34:09 Donald: I would Say you put a

0:34:11 Thomas: That's all on the power generation side and not on the carbon capture side, is that just because that's the easiest, the shortest path here, okay?

0:34:11 Donald: Yes. That's that would be power generation with carbon capture. Yeah, yeah. And then to repair the damage is this direct air capture, right? Get rid of the legacy CO2, get rid of CO2. That's hard to mitigate. And, and, you is starting to move. And so we'll see. And, voluntary market will drive to scale. I believe they, right now, we're talking about of thousands tons a year that's being captured. And they're talking by 2050, we need like 10 a year.

So that's like six orders of magnitude more capture, um, that's why you know I'm not sure that's going to be very hard to do, um, so mitigation will come into play, but if we ever hope to repair the damage, that all these technologies have got to be moved forward, and you really have to tax fossil fuels, um, until we and Europe and and and China you start to think that way, um, going to continue to have an uphill climb, and to say so, and India is a big problem, because while they're they're third on the list of CO2 emitters today, their population is only barely electrified, so They still need a lot more electricity and they don't have any natural gas. And And so it's all coal plants and wind and solar. They're putting in that too, but it's a lot of coal.

0:34:22 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yeah yeah so and There's obviously the kind of the climate justice component of it too, where it's like, why should they have to do everything when, you know, we have benefited from putting all the carbon in the air earlier, and now, you know, so there's those those concerns. But, um, guess one quick question from what you just said, what's the voluntary carbon capture? Because if without any sort of government intervention, I feel like the value of that is actually zero dollars. Like, who's going to pay for that? Has to be based on incentives, right? Because, because otherwise, what's the value of taking carbon out of the air? Like monetary value to like.

0:36:08 Donald: So no, so none. They voluntarily paying $600 a ton off of their bottom line to meet their climate goals to their shareholders. And they are losing money. They Money, but they think it's as a corporation. And there's only like a handful of them, maybe a dozen, that are thinking this way is that this is something that we have to do as a corporation. We're going to spend our shareholders' money to remove carbon from the air so that we can hit our climate goals. And they don't get anything for it, really, except

0:36:20 Thomas: Right.

0:36:45 Thomas: Other than, yeah, goodwill or whatever. Yeah, sure. OK, so it is. So there isn't isn 'T an incentive to be doing that. Or I thought the new bill did have some of that stuff.

0:36:47 Donald: Yep, yep. No. Well, so it's, like I said, $180 a ton. So they can take that credit. But if they're paying $600 a ton, they're still losing a ton of money.

0:36:58 Thomas: OK. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

0:37:03 Donald: Yeah, and – and that's why it's fragile, because they are basically just losing money to hit a corporate goal that their shareholders may or may not be like, hey, why don't you give that money to us as a dividend or something, right?

0:37:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that goes to show it's important as consumers. I mean, as much as I don't think the burden should be on us, at least doing everything we can do, it's important to make our preferences known through our dollar. And if the market reacts negatively to, you putting a bunch of carbon in the atmosphere, then maybe create some incentive for those companies to do better. Again, that's not like but it's another tiny thing to try to do.

0:37:42 Donald: I'm in this – and this is where the Republicans really hate all the ESG stuff, right. This is ESG, environmental, social, and governance policies that corporations are taking on to do better on the environment, to do better on corporate governance, and the in Congress are about that.

0:37:46 Thomas: What's the SG?

0:38:02 Thomas: I'm sure they're saying the woke, the woke are stealing their carbon.

0:38:04 Donald: The woke yes, the whoa, yeah, the, you know, corporations shouldn't be woke, but at the same time, corporations, corporations are people, so they can do what they want, probably.

0:38:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It woke to still have a planet? Probably. The manly men are over there not needing a planet.

0:38:19 Donald: Guess we can, we can try to live in, you know, the state of denial, but I just, I don't, I don't get it, but

0:38:20 Thomas: Um, so in kind like this bill is doing a good thing from your view. How, many of these friggin bills would we need to make a real difference? You know, where are we? It feels like I don't have a good handle for how much more of that would we, how many of these exact thing would we need to pass to really make a dent, you know?

0:38:42 Donald: Well, I think, um, um, perspective is that they would need to basically double those numbers, which I gave you, 180, and they would need to extend the life of those, um, at least 20 to 25 years, right now it's only 12 years, once you do that, something like that, the, now becomes profitable to take carbon out of the air, and, and Once you make it profitable, since there's essentially an unlimited amount of carbon, um, will start to see, um, plants come online, and obviously they have to use energy to do all this, you can't burn fossil fuels and do this, right, so, so they will actually be adding more renewables or, or nuclear, um, support, to support these, these facilities, um, so that's what it's going to take to really, you, fast and try to hit those 2050s, is to just increase those incentives, um, on the bottom line, people, people, individuals should be thinking about is, you, solar and wind in your communities, we will need a lot of that, as there are groups out there that specialize in, you, scaring town boards and County legislatures about wind and solar, you, and, and they go around and they get communities to kill projects, and you just, you got, we have to fight that, we, we have to have those projects.

0:39:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, stupid me. I thought you meant in the good way. So there are groups that are just like, we don't like making the planet better. Let's just not do solar.

0:40:03 Donald: No. They make up a lot of... It's the Trump, it's killing the birds thing, right? Windmills cause cancer, right. It's not quite that crazy, but it's pretty close. And it's literally a very small group and they just kind of go around and scare local, you public officials. It's completely crazy, and so individuals out there should be, you know, should stand up to those people, and that's

0:40:13 Thomas: Yeah, oh, right. The windmills. Yeah mm -hmm. Wow. Yeah create the the offsetting that.

0:40:35 Donald: Right, that's right, and continue to, we will see massive amounts of wind and solar in the next 10 years, and we should be glad and support that.

0:40:44 Thomas: Right. Well, uh, so much for doing this. I appreciate it. Um, again, since you're semi, anonymous here, I assume there's nothing you want to plug unless there's a something. You'd like to give a shout out to, I guess. Already said, let's make sure, to scare our cities and counties and towns and whatever the other way of those groups. So that's one thing. Is there anything else you want a shoutout?

0:41:01 Donald: Yeah, Well, I would just plug, you know, I will plug the Biden administration, um, the climate, um, that they've put through, and I don't think they're getting, um, credit that they deserve. And we should talk that up.

0:41:09 Thomas: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. I agree. I could go on a long political rant about that, but I won't. I appreciate it. I'm glad to hear from an expert that that's a good idea. OK, well, thanks so much. I really appreciate you coming on today.

0:41:22 Donald: Great, this was awesome, I really appreciate it, Thomas.