Startup Series: Enhanced Rock Weathering w/ Lithos Carbon & Eion Carbon
Today's guests are Mary Yap, Co-Founder and CEO at Lithos Carbon, and Adam Wolf, Co-Founder and CEO at Eion Carbon.
Both Lithos and Eion work in the space of enhanced rock weathering, a subset of carbon removal that seeks to speed up the planet's natural carbon cycle. In this process, rain absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, falls onto and weathers rocks and in doing so creates a bicarbonate solution that eventually finds its way into the ocean for permanent carbon sequestration. For all the talk of engineered carbon capture solutions, rock weathering is about as natural as you can get. It's the foundation of the earth's long carbon cycle, and it also takes place over millions of years, so a bit longer than we need right now.
In this episode, we seek to understand what it means to speed up this natural process and apply it to agriculture such that it can be a viable carbon sink in the decade-scale timeframe we need to address climate change. We have a great discussion about the long carbon cycle itself, the different types of rocks found on earth, how agriculture uses mineral inputs today, and some of the underlying economics of this method as a carbon removal technology. We also learn more about Lithos and Eion, plus Mary and Adam’s personal climate journeys.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @codysimms (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded July 25, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
Broad overview of the long carbon cycle
The power of acid rain in removing CO2 from the atmosphere
Earth as a habitable planet compared to Venus
An overview of bicarbonates
How enhanced rock weathering speeds up this carbon capture solution
Different types of rocks used for enhanced rock weathering
Benefits and drawbacks of using limestone
Energy demands of creating the Lithos and Eion products
Transportation challenges
Mary and Adam's MRV methods
Their company's business models
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Jason Jacobs: 00:00:00 Hey, everyone, Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute, and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ as we call it membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. We set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screened for, determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent, and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better. There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of non-profits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members, and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Jason Jacobs: 00:01:34 Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs. Welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change, and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Cody Simms: 00:01:56 Today, we're doing things a bit differently, and are featuring guests from two different companies at once, Mary Yap, co-founder and CEO at Lithos Carbon, and Adam Wolf, co-founder and CEO at Eion Carbon. That's spelled E-I-O-N Carbon. Both of their companies work in the space of enhanced rock weathering, a subset of carbon removal that seeks to speed up the planet's natural carbon cycle, wherein rain absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, falls onto and weathers rocks, and in doing so creates a bicarbonate solution that eventually finds its way into the ocean for permanent carbon sequestration. Also, you might notice that I'm not Jason. This is Cody Simms, Jason's partner at MCJ. I did today's interview with Mary and Adam, and you'll hear me take on episodes here and there going forward. For all the talk of engineered carbon capture solutions, rock weathering is about as natural as you can get. It's the foundation of the earth's long carbon cycle, and it also takes place over millions of years, so a bit longer than we need right now. I was therefore really interested to understand what it means to enhance this process, and speed it up such that it can be a viable carbon sink in the decade scale timeframe we need to address climate change. Mary, Adam, and I have a great discussion about the long carbon cycle itself, the different types of rock found on earth, how agriculture uses mineral inputs today, and how this would change with enhanced rock weathering, and some of the underlying economics of this method as a carbon removal technology. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did. Mary, Adam, welcome to the show.
Mary Yap: 00:03:32 Awesome. Thanks so much for having us.
Cody Simms: 00:03:34 Well, this is going to be a unique episode, having two founders of two different companies here. What I'm really excited to do is to explore the space broadly of enhanced rock weathering, and to understand it as a carbon removal solution, and then to make sure we also understand the unique approaches that each of you are taking to the space. Maybe let's start. Before we even get into enhanced rock weathering, let's understand what I've heard described as the long carbon cycle. Basically, without humans here, without any climate tech at all, what happens in the atmosphere from a rain, rock, carbon storage perspective? That, as far as I understand, is actually one of the things that makes earth a planet that can have stable temperatures that allows people to live on.
Adam Wolf: 00:04:24 In fact, there's a book almost by that exact title by Wallace Broecker called How to Build A Habitable Planet.
Mary Yap: 00:04:32 Love this book.
Adam Wolf: 00:04:32 You have to start with elements, and the planet needs to form, but there's this whole interesting section that for me is what makes earth science so endlessly fascinating, where there's a thermostat, where the mountain... Let's say the Indian subcontinent hits Asia. The Himalaya's rise. Of course, they start to erode, and that reaction brings the CO2 in the atmosphere down. What makes it a thermostat is when it's warmer when there's more CO2 in the atmosphere, it goes faster, bringing it back down. If it gets cooler, CO2 accumulates, and it slows down. So, we have the CO2 in the air that we have now relatively low, because of this mountain rock cycle that's happened over the last four and a half billion years.
Cody Simms: 00:05:28 Adam, the cycle that you're talking about is geologic time scale. We're talking about the rise and fall of ice ages here. Is that correct?
Adam Wolf: 00:05:35 No. No. No. Beyond ice ages. I'm talking about cretaceous. Let's go back at the start of the cretaceous. Let's say 65 million years ago, dinosaurs just died. At that time, Paleocene, it was super high CO2. That was around the era when the Himalayas are forming. If you're real geologists, correct me here, but that was the era when the formation of these mountains from the continental collisions started bringing CO2 down until by the time around two million years ago when the quaternary begins. That is when we're at this low, cool climate that predates the ice ages. Even between 65 million years ago and two million years ago, that's when we're talking about and just... I'll shut up in a second, but the CO2 that we're emitting into the atmosphere is taking us back into these prehistoric, prehuman, before so many even grasses evolved in that time, so it's so non-analogous.
Cody Simms: 00:06:57 Mary, maybe describe the weathering patterns that happen with rock in terms of... My understanding is we think of acid rain as a bad thing, but rain is actually naturally acidic, and that ends up creating this rock phenomenon that ultimately drives carbon into the ocean as far as I understand it. Walk me through what that actually looks like.
Mary Yap: 00:07:20 This is actually a really amazing thing to realize. This process that Adam and I and other enhanced weathering companies are looking at, this process already exists in nature. It removes about half a billion to one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, using the power of what you're talking about, Cody, this acid rain. In essence, what happens is the CO2 that's circulating around the globe combines with rain in the clouds, forms acid rain. We think of that as a really bad thing, but it actually has this thermostatic way of modulating climate. So when that hits silicate rocks, which is what most rocks on earth are made out of, leads to a chemical reaction by which that CO2 and that acid rain converted to a solid bicarbonate, that stuff is very hard reverse. That is now geologically stored, eventually goes into the ocean, falls to the bottom, becomes solid rock. Without this process on earth, we would look a lot like Venus. This is one of the only reasons earth is actually habitable today. That's critical to realize. When I did my research in geology and in planetary sciences at Yale, I actually built hydrological models of Titan, the only other body in the solar system that actually has a hydrologic cycle. The fact that we've got rain that combines with the CO2, removes that crap from the atmosphere is absolutely critical to life on earth. That's the process we're inspired by. Also, we are adding fossil fuel emissions all the time. Why hasn't it gone super hot? This is the answer, rock weathering. It's really powerful.
Cody Simms: 00:09:24 Combining what you said and what Adam said at the start, what I'm hearing is you have had this very volcanic environment, dinosaurs, et cetera created a high CO2 concentration, because our atmosphere has the ability to have rain in the hydraulics system. Then we had this also earth crust phenomenon, where the Himalayas were formed. It created a bunch of mountains. It created more exposure to rocks across the surface of the land combined with this more acidic CO2, heavy rain, ultimately than modulated the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere back down to a more oxygen rich environment, which ultimately cooled the earth by also allowing more heat to escape from the planetary confines of our atmosphere. Am I following at this point?
Adam Wolf: 00:10:11 I want to highlight something Mary said also, which is when you start looking at other planets in the solar system, you realize how special this earth is, and how many other different ways things could have gone that wouldn't even leave us with the world we have. When you start looking at Titan or Venus or Mars, you think like, "Holy smokes, this is precious to have our earth." I honestly feel even more motivated to do what it takes to preserve the biodiversity in what we have. I know there's certainly a group of people who are contemplating leaving the earth, inhabiting other places. For me, I just think like, "No. No. No. This is a once in a billion planet we have here."
Cody Simms: 00:11:05 100% there. Just to make sure I continue to understand the phenomenon, so this rain hits rocks. It creates a reaction with rocks that ultimately turns it into essentially a bicarbonate. I don't know what that is, so maybe you can explain what a bicarbonate is, which then ultimately either leeches through the soil, or ends up in our water systems, goes into the ocean. Then this bicarbonate over thousands or millions of years turns into animal shells and things like that that ultimately settles as limestone in the earth's crust. That's where the carbon is actually ultimately sequestered permanently mostly down at the bottom layer of the ocean. Am I, again, still following the thread here?
Adam Wolf: 00:11:46 I don't even think you're a real journalist, because you have it so accurately.
Cody Simms: 00:11:52 The power of Google before an interview is helpful.
Mary Yap: 00:11:55 Precisely. No, that was perfect, Cody. I think there are obviously nuances. Those are the nuances that Adam and I work on at Lithos and Eion. We have to work with the nuances of like, "How does it get transported? How do we measure that? How do we make sure leakage reversal isn't happening? Is this safe?" Those are the questions we need to solve for. But yes, precisely, scientists and geologists have studied this for such a long time. We do know that that exact process, you can, literally anyone, the farmers we work with, can go Google. They can figure this out. There are papers. Then it's nuances that we are really trying to develop here and deploy as technology.
Adam Wolf: 00:12:29 There's two distinctions that, Mary, I'm sure you find yourself making to people when you talk about it. In agriculture, people are used to thinking about soil organic carbon. We have to clarify that there's another kind of carbon, which is inorganic carbon. As well, this bicarbonate, it's dissolved. It's in solution, where historically, a lot of the work supported by the Department of Energy, and we've seen De Beers and others work on injecting CO2 in the mountains. It's a solid. It's a rock, and so this is this new category that hasn't had a lot of historical research into it outside of the earth sciences, where it's a core phenomenon, but underappreciated as a carbon solution.
Mary Yap: 00:13:23 Precisely. It's not escapable. A key thing since Adam opened up the can of worms that is soil organic carbon, that stuff can escape, so what we are doing is durable. It's permanent. It's becoming solid rock just in the same way that the earth system has done this for billions of years. That's the critical reason that this is equivalent to DAC, equivalent to the stuff that is building big machines to suck it out of the atmosphere, and store this rock. This is that, but in some ways, very, very much more scalable.
Cody Simms: 00:13:51 Well, we're going to dive all into how it's measured, how it compares to other forms of agricultural carbon storage and capture, et cetera. I want to stay on the top level thread just to make sure we understand the broader phenomenon first. The natural carbon cycle without humans intervening, and essentially pursuing new methods of carbon capture, we obviously know we're at a high point at least in human lifetime of CO2 concentration of over 420 parts per million right now. How long would it take this long carbon cycle to clear out human-contributed CO2? Are we talking thousands of years if it were just to naturally happen? If we stopped emitting everything today, would this natural long carbon cycle clear out the CO2 in the atmosphere over 5,000 years, over 100,000 years, over 300 years? Do we have a sense of the broad scale of its effectiveness?
Adam Wolf: 00:14:49 I love napkin math.
Mary Yap: 00:14:51 That's what I'm trying to-
Adam Wolf: 00:14:53 I think we're in the vicinity of having added a trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so 1,000 gigatons. I believe, and Mary please correct me if I'm wrong, that natural rock weathering removes about one gigaton a year.
Mary Yap: 00:15:11 Precisely. It's one gigaton.
Adam Wolf: 00:15:13 That's definitely 1,000-year timeframe.
Mary Yap: 00:15:15 There are also some really weird fluxes that can happen, Cody. So as stuff comes out of the atmosphere, biological systems of things don't reequilibrate the right way, then start to react in a weird way. Those are some of the weird questions that I would also ask. It would be awesome if we stopped emitting immediately, but then how does everything else react? Those are always questions. When you mess with ocean systems, when you mess with soil systems, weird things start to reequilibrate. I think, if there is a trillion tons in the atmosphere that we've added, then that would take at least 1,000 years to remove.
Cody Simms: 00:15:50 Well, we don't have 1,000 years, so let's maybe dive into the solutions that you each are pursuing. My understanding of enhanced rock weathering is it does a lot of what we just talked about in the natural carbon cycle, but you're taking crushed forms of silicate rock, and finely spreading it out over agricultural land, or there are some solutions that spread it out over the ocean, et cetera. We can talk about some of those differences, but ultimately by creating it crushed, you're increasing the surface area, and you're speeding up the natural process that we talked about. Is that a high-level understanding of what you're pursuing?
Mary Yap: 00:16:26 What I like to say is carbon capture is 90% chemistry, right? It's 90% chemistry and climate conditions. So yes, in theory, that is how it works, Cody. It's like when I try to bake, I know what goes into the bread, but I've never really had sourdough come out perfectly for me. That's where we come from, right? We have to take a high-tech approach to actually making that theoretical idea of spreading crushed-up silicate rocks in different settings. We need to figure out how to actually make that happen, and highly engineer that. But yes, that is the baseline that we're working from.
Cody Simms: 00:17:02 What are the different rock? I see just a baseline on different types of rock in... Those of us who are going back to our geology classes in college maybe, you've got silicate. You've got basalt. You've got olivine. You've got serpentine. Can someone give me a definition of each of those different types of rocks?
Adam Wolf: 00:17:22 All of those are silicates that you described, but then we've got our carbonate rocks. You can think of silicates are mountains, but carbonates are under the ocean. Where limestone comes from now, and if you live in Illinois, that is a barren seabed that evaporated. I'll pass the mic in a moment, but one of the contrasts to make is that calcium carbonate or dolomite, or that is used as ag lime, has a bunch of carbon in it. When it's applied to soils, that carbon is ancient carbon that is now available to go back into the atmosphere. A silicate could be a calcium silicate, magnesium silicate. That doesn't have that carbon. I'll pass it to Mary to take the next step on rocks.
Mary Yap: 00:18:18 There's a lot of different rocks here that we can use for our process. Like Adam said, we focus on silicate rocks. Our team at Lithos Carbon, we use basalt. It's a volcanic mineral. One of the things it's gotten going for, and it's one of the most common volcanic minerals on earth. If you think about Hawaii or Iceland, that black rock, you see the sand, the mountains, that's basalt. It's actually really common. In some ways, that's really great for scaling this technology, right? Basalt is a really great silicate rock for a few reasons. One, it's very, very low on metals. It's not going to cause harm to fields, where people are growing the things that we're eating every single day. But the other thing that we absolutely love is that it actually is packed with micronutrients. It has potassium. It has phosphorus. It has calcium, magnesium, aluminum, all these different things that our farmers at Lithos across different parts of the states, their soils are being stripped. Something really important to realize with farming, it's not just like perennials grow in your soil, and they do this every year. You actually have to bring things in to your farm, then bring the food away. That is stripping all that good stuff from the soils. So when we bring crushed up basalt rock to our farms, we are actually adding nutrients to those soils, helping regenerate that soil, helping with actually soil density and structure. There's just a whole series of co-benefits that are really fantastic for the farm. Basalt is great, packed with micronutrients, really good for soil regeneration, which I can talk about. Top soil is actually a huge issue America and the world is facing today in terms of growing crops. Then like Adam said, it replaces limestone. Limestone is net carbon positive. It releases 40% is the number, 40% of its weight back into the atmosphere, CO2. The government subsidizes that today, so Adam is in D.C. I don't know if he's talking about limestone to folks, but maybe he should be, because it's subsidized by the government. That's totally understandable, right? We need the limestone to desertify these fields, so farmers can grow their food, but there is a better way. Our basalt, the way we engineer it, can actually replace the limestone, bring these co-benefits, and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Cody Simms: 00:20:22 What I'm hearing you both say is basalt is this form of silicate rock that actually comes from mountains, and has been pushed up from the earth. Limestone is the rock that has already gone through this natural weathering process, and mostly comes from the bottom of the ocean, where it's already been heavily CO2 absorbed. Basalt doesn't have a lot of carbon, excuse me, in it. Limestone is heavy carbon. In the Midwest today... I grew up in Kansas, so very familiar with how prevalent limestone is. University of Kansas has beautiful limestone buildings all over the place. In the Midwest, lime has been used as a fertilizer, I assume, because of its prevalence as a mineral in the general agricultural region of the U.S. Is that why lime itself has become a primary fertilizer and soil amendment?
Mary Yap: 00:21:17 Cody, so the limestone is it can come from different things, but it is primarily like the shells of oysters, corals, different things that precipitate calcium carbonate. That's in the surface oceans, brings that into the shell. [inaudible 00:21:30], gets compacted, becomes limestone. One very common, the stuff from the bottom of the ocean over millions of years, that uplifts, and then it's exposed. There's tons of that stuff all around, especially in the Midwest, but there are actually places in America that have a dearth of limestone. The Pacific Northwest, there's limestone there, but because farms are fragmented, they have a hard time getting their hands of that limestone. Yes, one of the reasons is the prevalence, but there's actually another factor of limestone that make farmers like it so much today. It's because it's really reliable and really easy and understandable to use. Limestone is actually pretty consistent from what we've done. We've done some tests in the lab. Limestone all across America, all across the world, it's very soft. Think about like... You've probably scratched the wall of a limestone stone. It's very, very soft, and so it dissolves very immediately in the fields. It's very reliable, and can create that pH buffering to neutralize your soils really quickly. Some farmers even spread it at weird little moments in the season so that it just keeps doing a little buffering thing every few weeks. Because it's so reliable, it's so homogenous across the states. That's another reason it's so easy for farmers to use. One of the challenges we have with our technology, both the rock type that Adam is using, the rock type that we are using is that basalt is a lot harder. Also, every single basalt source that our team uses, it's actually different, the mineralogy, the capture potentials, the buffering capacity, different for the farmer, so a farmer can't just roll up and apply this willy-nilly, and be like, "I hope this works." He's running a small business. He can't afford to do that, and so we need to do a lot of different things to optimize the deployment of that to make it safe, profitable for farmers, and also make it do what... Just like baking, theoretically, it should capture carbon.
Cody Simms: 00:23:11 I think about... Farming, obviously, operates in seasonal cycles. Imagine... Remove yourself from agriculture. Remove your... Imagine you're running a manufacturing plant, and you're only producing a product once a year. You're probably not going to mess with your manufacturing process all that often. I think about the same way from a food production standpoint. We talked a bit about the benefits of limestone and why farmers use it today. What are the drawbacks of applying lime onto agricultural land that farmers and others that we're discovering through science are causing problems to whether it's top soil or whether it's to water or other things?
Adam Wolf: 00:23:50 I don't know. Lime is... I think of agriculture as a profession where one person out of 100 does it, and 99 people have an opinion on how they do it. There's probably not any production practice or input that doesn't have some opinion attached to it. Think about GMO seeds or fertilizers or whatnot. Lime, nobody doesn't like lime. Lime is the least controversial of all ag inputs, and so when you think about is there downsides to lime? I would say aside from this phenomenon where it's a slight CO2 emitter, it's just so common and ubiquitous that you'll be hard pressed to find people that have complaints. There are places where people can't get it. Economically, it's heavy. If you grow up in the south, there's historically not a lot of... When I say historically, I mean, geological historically. There's not a lot of limestone there, but in other ways, it is the status quo. There's just maybe arguably not enough of it.
Mary Yap: 00:25:00 I think that along those lines, what Adam said is so right. Limestone is not a controversial thing. People have been doing this for hundreds of years, and you can find fun papers online that I dug into at some point about this. There are a few issues with lime, but they're more logistical ones. But when it comes to running a business, as a small farmer, that is what it comes down to. One, there are certain regions where it's very hard to get your hands on it. There's a line from a farmer that we're working with where she was like, "If it's not a hurricane down in the south, it's not hurricaning today. That's a good day to spread lime." Unfortunately, I can't find the lime, and she hasn't been able to get it for fricking years. That's really, really rough as a farmer. Then for those who do get it, it's very expensive, so it's rising in prices partially because of fuel, and also just supply chains are wild right now. Some of our farmers actually do spend as much as a few hundred dollars an acre on that limestone. That's a significant cost, because if you don't put that in, none of the other nutrients you're adding to the soil can be uptaken by the plants. But if you have to do that, it's just very, very expensive. That's actually one of the problems. If you think about systems of supply and demand, the fact that there are these stockpiles of basalt or other rocks that can be used, or even some folks are looking at demolition concrete, Cody, so that might be something interesting for you all to dive into. There are these supplies of the stuff across the world near agricultural settings that can actually help supplant the dearth of limestone in some areas, and actually make this very economically efficient.
Mary Yap: 00:26:33 That's one of the things. Another thing is actually, it's always another thing to spread, right? Limestone, it doesn't do much apart from buffer your pH, absolutely critical, and it adds some calcium, especially dolomitic lime. That can be helpful. However, it takes you time, energy, and money to go across your field with that spreader, and get that stuff into the soil. The cool thing is that some of these other choices, whether it's a demolition concrete or basalt, which is what we use, it adds the other stuff as well. So if you can have not even a product, but a product that's in some ways all in one replaces the limestone, replaces a lot of the P and K. We're doing studies on that today. Replaces a lot of the nutrients folks need, and actually helps with pest resistance, which is a wild, new thing we're just getting into today. That actually helps with the logistics on the farm, the cost of the spreading, the diesel that goes into the spreader. It can make your life easier. I was just meeting with some peanut farmers. They were asking me, "Can I just use this, and mix it with some gypsum, and use that instead of the limestone and the five other things?" I was like, "Yeah."
Cody Simms: 00:27:35 I'm hearing the transition that farmers may make from lime to basalt is more of a vitamin than a painkiller, right? They don't have a ton of issues with lime today. There are some depending on where you are, but for the most part, you are advocating that basalt will provide more benefits for them above and beyond the lime that they use today. Is that correct?
Adam Wolf: 00:27:55 Look like if you understand how the structure of agriculture, who are the giants of agriculture, these are giants of chemistry. These are giants of genetics. These are giants of fertilizer.
Cody Simms: 00:28:13 These are the Cargills and Monsantos of the world, yes?
Adam Wolf: 00:28:16 Well, Cargill's a grain broker, so they're not an input company, but let's look at Syngenta, BASF, Yara, Bayer, whatnot. There have been just immense efforts among all these companies to try to raise yields. A lot of this is in the U.S., but a lot of it's overseas. Think Brazil and whatnot. Ultimately, they hit a wall because the efficacy of improved genetics or the efficacy of nutrients is blocked by acidic soils. It's just that there's no IP attached to limestone. So here, we've come to see that it's this almost... My partner makes the analogy with rural broadband. It's an amendment that makes everybody else act better, but historically, there's been no incentive to act as a group. There's no Lime Trade Association representative here in Washington D.C. I think, Mary, you may have discovered the same thing that there's a lot of limitations around acidity that unlock other opportunities and the adjacent inputs in agriculture.
Mary Yap: 00:29:39 Precisely. Cody, just to add another thing to what Adam said, I think that it actually is a painkiller. So when we talk to our farmers, they're not like, "Oh, cool. This has some carbon benefits." Our approach to the market is actually like the Tesla approach. Let's take a step back here. Tesla's trying to build a car that regardless of the climate benefit, you're going to want, because it's so freaking fun to drive a Tesla. It accelerates so fast, right? It's a great product regardless of the climate benefits. Honestly, I think that's a very novel and smart approach to the market. What we are trying to do at Lithos is we're trying to build something that's so good for farmers, that ignore all the carbon stuff, ignore that this is a silicate mineral, ignore that this is inspired by nature's own thermostat, ignore all of that. If this is something that's a painkiller for farmers, because it solves the limestone problem, it solves the volatility and the price of agricultural inputs like P and K today, solves the spreading problem, and helps resistance with pests, and improves crop yields, that's something the farmers want. The most obvious thing I actually advocate that's a painkiller for them is these farmers do spend hundreds of dollars on the limestone today. At the moment, we're actually completely able to replace that for them without a cost simply because we are doing all these other co-benefits including the carbon capture, and that pays for itself. So in some ways, that's a really big benefit for the farmer. You're getting something that on our side, we can guarantee crop yields for farmers. They know that this is safe, and looks like a rock dust. It's not like a magical pixie powder that someone weird is trying to sell to them. That way, it really is a painkiller, Cody. It's solving the problems they have, their bottom line, their crop yields, pest resistance. It's doing it all in one without any weird risk, not a weird biological fertilizer. It's a rock dust.
Cody Simms: 00:31:27 Help me understand. You mentioned two things that I want to dive into. One, you said a lot of basalt comes from volcanic islands, Hawaii, et cetera. Two is that it's hard, whereas limestone is soft. I'm assuming, a, we talked about limestone naturally lives in the Midwest. B, it's soft, so it's easy to crush in order to spread. Basalt, you're having to pull it from places that are volcanic, which is not where a lot of agricultural land is. B, it's hard, which means... I assume it takes a lot of energy to crush it to a usable form. Help me understand the energy demand of creating the product that you're selling, and the transportation and distribution challenges therein. How does that factor into the overall carbon accounting of the product?
Mary Yap: 00:32:16 Brilliant. Great question, Cody. When I was deciding if this is something that I could actually help scale, that was the question I spent literally months on. A few different things there. One, it's not just in Hawaii and Iceland. I know I said that, because it helps people visualize it, but the cool thing is just like Adam was talking about this chart for continents have moved around, and crazy shit has uplifted over time. There's volcanic rock in America. The most obvious one is the Pacific Northwest. We've got Mount St. Helens there. There's actually a ton of basalt over in the Midwest, up near Michigan, near Wisconsin, et cetera. There's basalt actually in the northeast and the south. We found basalt in a bunch of places, and so our team currently has found over 200 million tons of stockpiled waste basalt. I want to double click on that. It's not just basalt that has to be mined. That's surficial. We've actually done a geological study of that, and we've found that on average, the average American farm is only 183 miles from a surficial basalt deposit. We checked that that it exists, and then it's close to agricultural land. But today, there's actually mines across America. They're mining basalt for use in aggregate and construction and concrete and the like. In a lot of states, you're required by law to wash the dusts off of that product, and it creates these massive stockpiles. I've gone to these stockpiles, and walked on top of them. They're literally millions of tons. It looks like you're in the desert. There's literally a stockpile of dust that nobody's using that they often even pay landfills to take that off their hands.
Mary Yap: 00:33:44 So in some ways, you are actually alleviating an environmental burden. You're alleviating the fact that this is taking up a bunch of space on a site, and we're getting rid of that in a circular economy. At the moment, Cody, I've not spent any money or energy crushing up more basalt rock. I've not spent any energy mining new basalt rock. We are focused on using down that few hundred million tons of stockpiled waste product, making sure that it's safe, making sure in some cases we've gone certified organic, making sure it's good for farmers, and then getting that stuff to the field. Then it becomes a transport cost. I mean, I'm sure Adam knows this as well. This is the pain in our butts. That's hard. Most of our costs are eaten up by transport today. We're working on making that more efficient by using railroads and bulk transport, but that's really when push comes to shove, that's the biggest problem here. Folks are actually transporting, I think, it's maybe 30 million tons of limestone or something like this every year. I think I've read this somewhere. That's great. We need to swap that out with basalt, in my opinion. It's in some ways a solved problem. Everyone in America is trying to transport things cheaper. Now, we are early to the market. We're trying to transport a different rock dust cheaper, and we believe it should be better, but would love to hear Adam's thoughts as well.
Adam Wolf: 00:35:01 I agree that the transportation part is both from a cash cost and from a carbon cost perspective, the highest. I spent a lot of time working on the carbon budget of the extraction and the processing part. I call it intellectual curiosity. If we're going to take this to scale, we have to imagine that we're going to grind up some rocks. In the end, it turns out that even though we might be using diesel power, and even though we might be using a grid that might be in the realm of 0.4, 0.5 kilograms, like middle of the pack emissions per kilowatt hour, that all of that extraction processing ends up offsetting the carbon removal by a relatively small amount. I know some of the early work here was precisely around like, "Gosh, in order to get the surface area, you have to make it smaller." As Mary pointed out, there's a lot of fines around that are already small. But even in the case where as a society, let's picture to pay down that trillion tons that are in the atmosphere, we're going to be doing this I would say for a few generations, and there's enough rock in the world to offset 700 years of business as usual emissions. That's long past peak oil and whatnot, but I want you to picture that this is going to be ubiquitous. As we start to imagine that scale, certainly, the processing step doesn't offset it. What's more, even at this outset, I feel a little bit sheepish about saying this, but we can use fossil fuel to do it. We're not displacing the deployment of renewables. That, I think, is important for bringing the energy production into net zero itself.
Mary Yap: 00:37:01 Actually, just double click on that. Likewise, Adam, we should collaborate more because we also did a similar study, where we modeled out what would it look like to do a breakeven where you're spending way too much energy crushing up the rock to a small particle size that this is not working for the carbon capture. In some states, it's so efficient. Washington is hydro powered. We calculate in Washington, you're going to have to grind up the rock to 0.0001. That's literally the number I have on my screen. That's much smaller than the blood cell. We're okay. We don't need dust that small, right? It would still be before that point still doing more good than harm. It's different depending on the energy grid at every single state. But like Adam said, think big picture here. We need to take down that debt that we've accrued as a society. This is actually one of the most scalable ways of doing it. When you compare us to DAC, which needs to create foldable takes, and create solar power, or burn waste and stuff to power the stuff that they're doing with direct air capture, this is actually far more scalable.
Mary Yap: 00:37:58 I think, I guess it looks like Adam and us, we have both done calculations like, "This actually could scale." I think what we're getting into here is that in order to make the biggest impact possible when you look at these life cycle assessments, we need to get really deep into the weeds of efficiency and the economics of this, right? One, it needs to not cost more than it's feasible. Ideally, it doesn't cost more than DAC, which it doesn't for us today, costs about a fifth of the price. Second, you have to make this process really efficient. There are some teams out there that are applying a lot of dust to fields, and it's not reacting. So then you've spent money transporting that. You're spending money on your MRV. You are maybe freaking out a few farmers, and it's not reacting for 15 years to 50 years. That's where, I think, Adam and I are probably both double clicking on. We need to make sure that the weathering is actually happening. We need to make sure that it's actually happening in a rate that matters, and that we're being accountable for that, so we're not just spending money in emissions, dumping rock dust in fields without knowing what is happening, going back to the baking metaphor.
Cody Simms: 00:39:02 Mary, you set me up for my next question, which is we've talked now about the inputs. Let's talk about the actual outputs here. My understanding back to the process that you're trying to replicate from nature is you're putting this basalt dust on these fields. It is getting absorbed into the soil, and the actual sequestration happens either by absorption into plant roots or by going all the way down into the ocean, and becoming part of the carbon cycle. I don't know if that's correct statement, but two things. One, on soil carbon sequestration, I know regenerative ag and all of that is pretty far along at this point, but there still aren't a lot of CDR buyers, carbon dioxide removal buyers for soil sequestration yet just because the ability to measure it is still quite immature. It's still being worked out. You're going beyond in the soil, and needing to measure outputs all the way down to how is this getting into the ocean, and reacting at the bottom of the ocean? How in the world is this measured and verified?
Adam Wolf: 00:40:01 I mean, it's worth setting up the contrast with soil organic carbon better. I think, everybody agrees that more soil carbon is good, and no-till covered crops even just from a soil conservation erosion reduction perspective are better, but having worked on experiments at UC Davis and such places, you can find a field that was managed identically 20 yards away that has radically different soil carbon. You can measure that difference per plot. You can measure it per month, per year. In other words, it's not simply that the measurements are like, "I wish we had more accurate measurements." It's super dynamic. It can go up or down, and the models don't really work. This is something that Mary pointed out that the weathering rates are unpredictable, but fundamentally, this goes in one direction. Thermodynamics means that this is going to dissolve, and it's not going to reform a crystal. So, a farmer is left holding the bag of risk of signing a contract to say, "I'm going to deliver a ton in the next five years, and I would not sign that contract because it's so fundamentally hard to predict, or a measurement might not speak to what the real carbon sequestration was, and so it's not reliable." That's why on the one hand, there's-
Cody Simms: 00:41:46 Adam, that's for soil sequestration. Just to be clear.
Adam Wolf: 00:41:48 Soil organic carbon. You find less than 1% of farmers have signed up for one of the legacy soil carbon programs. Even then, on a fraction of their lands, the Farm Bureau doesn't recommend you join a soil carbon program. Ultimately, they look a lot like acquisition of customers into legacy data programs more than they look like carbon removal programs. I think when you're talking about this mineral carbon removal, it's a little bit more predictable as far as the carbon piece.
Mary Yap: 00:42:29 I mean, I think of this from a farmer's perspective as well. Adam just covered the signs of this, which was fantastic. But when you think about this from a farmer perspective, there's a few issues, and it comes down to the economics of this. One, we work with a ton of farmers to actually no-till, because it's helpful to prevent erosion, which again, I'm very scared about. We are losing topsoil 10 times faster than we're regenerating it. That's going to become an issue, y'all. But farmers today, they already often no till for general practices. But if you're trying to ask a farmer to do this for carbon crediting and accounting purposes, that gets really hairy really fast. One, as Adam might have mentioned, this stuff is reversible. So when a hurricane rips through that field that my farmer has just spent so much time and money putting limestone on, and no tilling to try to keep the carbon deep in the soil... I think it's night where Adam is. It's time to go to sleep. Sorry. When a hurricane rips through that no-till farm, that carbon can just come out of the soil. How does a buyer get behind that and pay top dollar for that? They really, really can't. That way, soil organic carbon is not very fungible. In fact, it was just canceled by Canada. In Canada, you are no longer able or allowed to by no-till soil organic carbon credits, right? On the other hand, our stuff is not really reversible. It's bicarbonate. There's some leakage that can happen in the rivers, which is actually a really key part of the MRV that we do on our team today. However, it's much, much more valuable.
Mary Yap: 00:43:53 So when you're telling a farmer, "Don't till. This is good for your lands. We can maybe pay you $10 every few years." It's a big risk for them. They don't know about that. They don't know about the reversibility. Also, if you don't till, sometimes you grow a lot of weeds, and so it's a new practice change. On the other hand, with the rock dust, it's a rock dust that subs for a more expensive product. So when we get into really understanding, as you asked, Cody, how to measure this, it's completely different from soil organic carbon to what we do, which is akin to direct air capture in terms of the quality of the carbon. So with soil organic carbon, they often do models because it's too expensive to try empirically measure this when it's reversible, and people won't pay top dollar, basic economics incentives problem. For us, we are doing something that is permanent, durable, and for that reason, much, much more valuable for the farmers and for buyers. What our team does is we do a few different steps of the process, and there's different ways of doing this. I think the lowest quality method, which neither Adam nor our team does, as you know, there are teams that just... Not teams. There are research groups that are just figuring out like, "Can we just only model this? Can we just guess how much carbon is going to be sequestered by basalt or by olivine or by these other rocks?" I don't think that's the best approach to lay a good groundwork for the market. If it's just a model, you make what you measure like, "How can we be sure this is worth?" When we've done it in our research settings, we found that you might think you're capturing this much carbon, but because soil is so complex, it happens over 15 years, or it doesn't happen at all, or in the worst case, it causes reverse silicate weathering, which causes CO2 to off gas from the field after dumping all of the basalt.
Mary Yap: 00:45:27 That's just ridiculous. That's absurd. Nobody wants that, and so you really need... You make what you measure. You really need to measure it. There's a few different approaches, and I'll give a lay of the land for the starting part of MRV. Some folks can do things with lysimeters or waters. There are different problems where lysimeters and waters are immediate snapshots of what's happening in the field. Often, if you take a water type reading at 10:00 AM versus 10:00 PM, you get completely different readings, because different things are coming into the water flows at different times. I studied hydrology. There's fluid dynamics. That's just a basic way of doing that, so you're going to have to get into some statistical analysis to understand what's happening. At our team, we do a soil-based approach. My co-founder, Noah, who's a professor at Yale, but also a family farmer, he still runs the family farm today. He knows that farmers actually soil sample almost every year in order to understand what's going on in their fields. So, we just get them to send us another one of the soil samples. We run our isotopic spike cocktail on that. We're able to measure with less than 0.5% error on each element in the basalt, in the background soils, how much carbon is being captured in an integrated way, not just at a snap, but integrated and with really high accuracy. That's how our team gets at the high level amount of carbon that's initially converted to the bicarbonate, and sequestered. Then we do a whole cradle to grave approach. That tracks it through rivers, the ocean, et cetera. I will pause there.
Cody Simms: 00:46:48 Adam, any comments on your approach with MRV?
Adam Wolf: 00:46:52 I would say broadly consistent, some differences in the soil chemistry, and yet, this idea of it's easier to measure stocks than fluxes has been a key theme. Some of the people that have been trying with difficulty to develop MRV approaches have been trying to look at the concentration of the efflux. Fundamentally, you will get shot if you start spending time around tile drains measuring the water, but more importantly, the subsurface flow is quite complicated.
Cody Simms: 00:47:35 Sorry, just to make sure I understand, is this trying to measure the change in chemistry in the water table, essentially in groundwater? Is that what you're talking about?
Adam Wolf: 00:47:46 I'm going to make an analogy. Let's say there's a couple ways to figure out vehicular CO2 emissions. On the one hand, you could just send me your gas station receipts from the last year. To a first approximation, I'm going to have a really good sense of how much CO2 was emitted from your car. The expensive way is the California Resources Board has a really complicated CO2 monitoring system for the tailpipe to know exactly the speciation between the CO2, the carbon monoxide, et cetera. But you know as a driver intuitively, gosh, it's easier to know how big is the gas tank, and how full is the gas tank to know how much of that rock was put on, and how much of that rock has dissolved and left. There's a bunch of checks that Mary described. Let's look at the downstream river chemistry to see, are there conditions that would lead to the CO2 leaving? But this is very similar to the systems that are in place for even the federal government's MRV approaches for carbon capture and storage, which is on the one hand measuring the process that is capturing and injecting, and on the other hand, modeling the hell out of all of the ways that that carbon dioxide could leak back out of that permanent geological storage. So, by leveraging the cognitive infrastructure that's in place around, it's really good supply chains to know how much of that rock went on, what its composition was, how much is left. This gets you to a level of precision that is enviable within the carbon removal industry.
Cody Simms: 00:49:50 Since obviously the whole reason for doing MRV is to be able to sell some form of carbon credit reliably, we haven't talked about either of your companies in detail, or your business models. Maybe each of you just describe a bit about Lithos and Eion in particular, as well as the business model you plan to pursue both with respect to selling the input to farmers as well as the credit that you expect to be able to monetize.
Adam Wolf: 00:50:18 You are such a capitalist. I knew you were going to start asking business questions after all that chemistry. I don't think either of us will say very much that's different. Stripe, Microsoft, Shopify started, oh, I don't know, about five years ago thinking about what constitutes high quality carbon removal, because so much of the world was littered with poor governance, lack of oversight, essentially using marketing dollars to highlight offsets that were being purchased, but robbing the atmosphere of the actual carbon that was promised. People started looking at what constitutes high quality carbon removal? Permanence shows up high on the list. Verifiability, can this scale to reach an affordable price? Does this displace arable land? You might think this is a funny question, but if we're deploying solar panels, you can't generally practice agriculture, or if we're reducing yields, that may displace agriculture into places where it drives deforestation. This is like leakage in the context of... That process of identifying high-quality carbon identified this premium category that achieves higher dollar prices now than historically the voluntary carbon markets have made.
Adam Wolf: 00:51:55 That's where the carbon buyers are, but I know from the soil organic carbon programs, that even if you're a well-funded startup with north of a billion dollars, and you are well able to sell the carbon credits, it doesn't mean the farmers want to participate. This is a solution that ultimately wins on the acre, or dies on the acre, and so this interaction with the farmer and making sure that the economics work for them is where this survives. You might immediately think like, "How much are we paying the farmer?" But as Mary pointed out, they're farming to farm. They're farming to produce crops, and sell them. This marginal gain attached to carbon is relatively small and too risky for them, and so the gains ultimately that have to be delivered to the farmer are agronomic. We're talking about what is the yield lift? What are the other nutrient efficiencies that can be gained? How does this fit logistically within their other operations? Can you cut out an operation, whatnot? In different parts of the country, different crops, you might find different value propositions that shape what the price of the offering is. But ultimately, that is where all the business model innovation and a lot of the fun is in starting the business. Once you get the chemistry, you realize like, "The rock's going to dissolve. It's inevitable." What's the next part? Here, I find that there's endless variation in the business model iteration that are possible in, frankly, creating alignments with other entities in the ag industry that are really exciting.
Mary Yap: 00:53:48 Awesome. I mean, I think taking a step back a little bit, so Cody, you asked what's the business model? How does this scale? How are you thinking about credits? All great questions. I think taking a step back, the question we really need to focus on is scale, right? I think, Adam and I sit in a different place where it's not a FinTech company. It's great to make profits. Obviously, we're all trying to make profits so that a company can keep going. But the key question here is how do you get this to a scale that matters? To date, the companies that've captured the most carbon in the world, [inaudible 00:54:18] Climeworks, wonderful teams. They're at 5,000 tons, and that is awesome. I am inspired by that. They were first movers, but we need to get to even more. All of this are running after a billion tons, so how do we do that? How do we really reimagine an agronomic system that can get us to a billion tons? That's really freaking scary, right? There are more than a billion people on Facebook. There are playbooks for so many other things when it comes to tech, which is your background as well, Cody at Techstars. How do we get to a billion tons of capture? This is moving atoms, not bits.
Mary Yap: 00:54:48 That's hard. How we approach it from Lithos is like, "What can we do as a company with the technology we've developed, with the promises we can make to farmers, to the way we can make these economic incentives work on the farm? Then how do we pair this with the right players to get to a freaking billion tons not in 100 years when things are really hot, but within a decade?" Those are the questions I'm going to try to answer for you. I think one, exactly what Adam said. We have to care about the farmers. These are the people that are deploying the stuff in their land. If we're trying to get in a helicopter and spread this on a forest, fine, we don't need to care about farmers, but that's not the most efficient way. There's already trillions of dollars of infrastructure in agricultural settings. These farmers are spreading limestone. They can do this. We just need to make sure that this is something they want to do. So going back to the Tesla model analogy, building something that they want, ignore the climate stuff. For now, we saw climate change as a side effect.
Mary Yap: 00:55:41 So, how we think about that is for my team... My family are all small holder, vegetable farmers in the highlands of Taiwan. They struggle with this kind of stuff, so I understand how hard it is to make margins work. Same thing with Noah, so co-runs the family farm today. What we come down to is we need to be able to guarantee to farmers that this can completely replace the limestone on their fields. At the moment, we can give it to them for free, because the carbon credit pays for that. It's almost like non-dilutive funding for the sustainability program or something, right? If we can replace the limestone, reduce the limestone impact, suck carbon out of the atmosphere, have these agronomic benefits, that's the key thing. If we cannot do that, then nobody who's doing enhanced weathering in the agricultural settings will succeed. The good thing is that the research right now is positive, so we are seeing in our trials anything from 5% to 47% crop yield improvements, which sounds like crazy statistical error. It's not. It's because soil types are different. It's because two farmers within five miles of each other, totally different organic practices, totally different crop types, totally different soils for a few hundred years, totally different things.
Mary Yap: 00:56:44 What we are building partially is actually a machine-learning based model that takes in all the data from each acre of land that we deploy on, takes in that stuff about the crop yield inputs, and the crop yield improvements that we generate, and helps us understand where the most efficient places for agronomic benefits for farmers as well as the carbon capture rates that we are verifying with our high quality MRV. That's one thing, being accountable to farmers, answering their questions because that is out of the gate the first hurdle you're going to need to clear. The second hurdle is economically making this feasible. I'm actually really curious. This is a really exciting conversation for me, because I'm curious what other players in the enhanced weathering space are doing. How we approach it in terms of ethos is we're not land grabby. We do not feel like we need to own the truck that moves the basalt. If someone else wants to do that, that's actually fantastic. In fact, just to take a step back, I found out recently that in Malaysia, which is where the other half of my family is from, the government is funding research into using basalt to rehabilitate soil, so you can grow in places you can never grow.
Mary Yap: 00:57:47 All right. So if people want to move around basalt, because it's good for farms, that's great. We would love to figure out how to optimize that for carbon capture, make sure that this is additional, and help plug into other players who are interested in this carbon capture space. On our team, we would really love to continue doubling down on our MRV approach, continue doubling down on that optimization software that enables us to guarantee to farmers that their crop yields will be the same or better, double down on those two things. We currently are working on licensing at our tech to some folks in other countries who are deploying basalt to capture carbon, but don't know how to do it, and don't know how to measure it. That's part of our business model today. We really would love to build a community of agricultural retailers of awesome people like Adam and other folks who are doing enhanced weathering, helping the entire community be really open, rigorous and transparent, so we don't get canceled like no till. That would be a little bit of a disaster, just kill this up front, right? We don't want that. We're really focused on openness, transparency, trying to make something that works for farmers, and then scaling throughout any partnership channels that we can. At the moment, we are working with a bunch of our own live farmers today across the Midwest, Northeast, Southeast. That's really exciting for us. We're proving that out on a small scale, but really to get to scale, and we want to make it dense, we're going to need to do things beyond just us. That's our perspective on things, happy to talk more about actual unit economics or other business model things, but high level wanting to convey that scale is all that matters when it comes to carbon capture. It's no fun to just do this for research. I mean, it is actually really fun, but it's not what matters.
Cody Simms: 00:59:22 How far off do you think we are from a verifiable methodology that can reliably sell carbon capture through enhanced rock weathering at a relatively set price point or predictable price point?
Adam Wolf: 00:59:35 We could both testify that it's a past tense question. The verification methodologies exist, and they're in the process of publication.
Mary Yap: 00:59:46 I mean, both of our teams have sold our carbon credits. Our team sold carbon credits to the Frontier Climate fund, which is backed by Meta and McKenzie and Stripe and Shopify and Alphabet, right? We both have sold carbon credits. That's really exciting, but what you're getting at with the methodology like a third party verifier, which we're fully supportive of, I think that's coming down the pipeline. One, we're going to publish everything that we do. That's so important for us. Two of my co-founding team, they're professors. That's literally what we do, right? So, openness, rigor, and transparency, super important for developing these methodologies. But actually, there are other players in the space, third parties who are seeking to verify this today. I mean, I think, [inaudible 01:00:26] just announced a few weeks ago that they want to develop a methodology for enhanced weathering. It might take a while, but this stuff is coming down the pipeline. I think, it will really help with making sure that there's a consistent approach across the field. We can all do this in different ways, but there has to be a level, a standard of rigor in terms of making sure this is not what's happening with no-till for example, and that's happening already.
Adam Wolf: 01:00:50 I think one of the important parts where we're both very aligned is making sure that the methodologies and approaches are rigorous, and so they don't end up being diluted and ultimately souring people on what the potential is, because I mean, agriculture is littered with AgTech promises that have failed to deliver that which was promised. I mean, Jack was sold as magic beans. But if we think about CDR as well, there's a wonderful diversity of different approaches to carbon removal. Yet, I think we are as if we can call it an industry aware that the minute any one of us sells poorly-verified credits, it's going to look bad on all of us. There's cynics who are waiting to see, "I knew it was a scam," and so being able to have a collectively high bar to meet as far as rigor is good. We both are lucky that we're talking about things that show up in trucks. This is solved problem, tamper seals on a truck. That was probably 100-year-old invention that can be leveraged here.
Cody Simms: 01:02:09 Well, Adam and Mary, I appreciate both of you mentioning the spirit of collaboration in each of your final remarks there. That just goes to show how eager you both were to come on here, talk about your companies that are approaching similar spaces openly and together. Really appreciate you walking all of us through the chemistry, the natural processes that you're using as a foundation to build your businesses, and also how you see this space evolving. What didn't I ask? Anything I should have asked about or pressed on that you think is important for people to hear, to understand the problem that you're going after?
Adam Wolf: 01:02:48 I mean, you called it My Climate Journey, and you didn't ask anything like what brought us to the moment where we founded these companies.
Cody Simms: 01:02:57 That is true. Usually, we spend more time on the bios. I think we spent so much time on the chemistry. We didn't get there, but would love to hear that from each of you if you want to share briefly about your own journeys.
Adam Wolf: 01:03:09 I want to hear about [inaudible 01:03:10] Taiwan is incredible, but I'd be in Venus, but I'd be curious to hear what brought you here, Mary.
Mary Yap: 01:03:17 For sure. Likewise, Adam, would love to hear your journey. I've come from a pretty non-traditional background, but at the same time, I think we actually all have with climate. It's a very new field. My background was I worked in consumer tech for about over half a decade before coming into climate. I've always been a nature junkie. I grew up in the fields growing fricking sweet peas and stuff. I'm still a big scuba diver today. I love wildlife photography. Nature is the biggest source of wonder in the world, and that's why we're around, right? I worked in consumer tech ever since I was 18. I originally studied plant biology in the Midwest at the University of Chicago, dropped out, worked in early stage companies, consumer tech or FinTech. It's really, really great to build things when you're 18 that millions of people in dozens of countries use. That's thrilling. It's very, very addicting. But in 2016, I went through a personal crisis. A couple of close friends passed away in a freak accident, really fricking made me realize. It made me really confront that survival's not guaranteed for us as individuals or as a society. That was a really... It just sharpens everything when you get hit by something like that, and so I made this choice to step away from a career that I really loved, a team that I absolutely loved, and have had helped build, took some time, traveled back to Southeast Asia where my family lives and where some of them are farmers, thought about the fact that the freaking rice patties cannot grow rice. That really freaked me out, guys, really seeing that very, very scary. Visited cities where my father lives, and was like, "Oh my God, my dad is saying that this is 20 degrees hotter than it was in his childhood in Malaysia. That is not okay." If I'm going to get hit by a bus in two years, I want to be working on the one problem that I can work on for the rest of my life. For me, it was just so clear in that moment what that problem was. I went back to school at Yale, studied geology and planetary sciences, learned about hydrology, Venus, all the stuff we talked about today, and met my co-founders, who had been working on this technology for the better part of a decade. They're so committed to this. Literally, they'd mess with ocean alkalinity, all the different things DAC tried to figure out what they thought was the most scalable. I'm just so lucky that I got to join them on their climate journeys as well, and help bring this research into a commercial setting where we actually hope to get to scale. That's in a nutshell how I got to this. My family are farmers in Taiwan. It really hits home. We are not robots, at least not yet. We all need to eat, and we all need to get rid of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So in some ways, it's a really beautiful solution that brings home two of the problems that humanity is going to have to space, or else we're going to go down.
Cody Simms: 01:05:54 Mary, I super appreciate you sharing your story. I'm sorry that obviously you had some personal tragedies, but am also grateful that it brought you to helping to build this solution today. It's interesting to hear you position enhanced rock weathering a little bit as both a mitigation and an adaptation solution in terms of its applicability to agriculture and helping farmers continue to grow food in the changing climate that we have, which hopefully, your solution could be one of the tools in the toolkit that helps mitigate, but that we also obviously need to keep feeding the earth, which is projected to grow to 10 billion humans over the next couple decades.
Mary Yap: 01:06:34 Exactly. Precisely.
Cody Simms: 01:06:37 Adam, love to hear your story.
Adam Wolf: 01:06:38 I mean, there's a bunch of parts of Mary's story that resonated. I went to college to study agricultural science. I started to be a beer brewer in the fermentation science program at UC Davis, but ended up falling in love with agriculture. You can understand everything through the lens of agriculture. You can understand law. You can understand politics, genetic soils. You name it. So as a wayward teen, I felt like, "Oh, now, I'm starting to understand how the world works." In particular, I had this grasp that the environment is agriculture. It's managed lands, and humans are in charge of the environment. Stewart Brand has this line that we are as gods, so we may as well get good at it. We're managing all these lands. I worked for the farm advisor. I did a little work as a crop consultant. My path was the academic one, so I ended up going to the Republic of Kazakhstan actually for my master's research. This is my first intersection with carbon world. It was around 1999, and the USDA had a funny program to use carbon credits as a way to support development, and disregarding the irony that Kazakhstan's a major oil producer. You had all this abandoned land. Gosh, I wonder if we can pay people to keep that carbon under wraps, but it takes a whiff of a change in commodity prices, and farmers are going to put that land back into production. So already, I've got this idea that it's pretty transient. Paid for my grad school, but I ended up following this path that took me to Stanford. I was doing all this kind of work, turning plants into numbers, really, all the climate models have some representation of how plants work. I found it so ironic.
Adam Wolf: 01:08:46 In 2008, my thesis advisor, Chris Field, he got to sit next to the king of Sweden because they got the Nobel peace prize for the IPCC. Yet, that very same year, business as usual emissions, actual emissions exceeded the fossil intensive scenario that was in the IPCC. This is my first sense as an academic that we're not going to publish our way out of this. There's no abundance of information that's actually going to solve this. At this moment, it was funny. Stanford had the very first class on how to program an iPhone, and we're getting the sense of like, "Oh yeah, smartphones, apps." IoT, I taught myself how to make circuit boards. I started a company around agricultural decisions based on local information, because I had an optimism that, "Oh, if people had the right information, they'd make the right decisions." But ultimately, I wouldn't delegate my thinking to an app developed 1,000 miles away. Why would a farmer? I think there's a lot of value in data and agriculture. There's too little of it, but ultimately, what drives behavior change is slow, and it's intergenerational. Really, when I started to see my squeamishness about the new generation of carbon programs in agriculture, red soil organic carbon, while at the same time realizing this opportunity presented by permanent mineral carbon sequestration, it felt like, "Oh, this is something that requires no practice change," and the offering to the farmer is 100% aligned with their existing practice. Yet, it solves the problem that we set out to do. The digital component is all... That's consumed by the likes of Stripe and others who want to look at digital data.
Adam Wolf: 01:10:59 The farmer is like, "Don't show me the app again." This, I think, is really exciting as an opportunity to make a product that actually fully solves the problem, which as a product designer is the holy grail is like, "Can I actually solve the problem, and not just tell people they have a problem, not just benchmark the problem, not just diligence the problem, but I feel so satisfied that I'm solving the problem?" When we solved the problem, on the one hand, it's carbon, but on the other hand, there's real problems in rural America as far as being pinched on margins. It feels really good to be able to deliver a win, delivering economic opportunities to rural areas. I feel lucky that I landed here.
Cody Simms: 01:11:51 Well, Adam and Mary, I so appreciate you both coming on. For folks who are listening, obviously, again, two different founders and CEOs of two different companies, so Mary Yap with Lithos Carbon, and Adam Wolf with Eion Carbon. That is spelled E-I-O-N. I'm sure they would both love you to check out their websites, and dive into what they're doing. Hopefully they've inspired some folks to learn more about this space, and join them in their collaborative efforts as it continues to evolve. Mary, Adam, thank you both very much.
Mary Yap: 01:12:23 Thanks so much for having us. It was great. Good to meet you, Adam.
Adam Wolf: 01:12:27 Good to meet you, Mary. Thanks, Cody, for bringing us together.
Jason Jacobs: 01:12:30 Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note, that is .co, not .com. Someday, we'll get the .com, but right now, .co. You can also find me on Twitter at JJacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode, or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. Before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend, or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
