Rob Curran, thanks very much for joining us. Robin, I wanted to
start just by asking you a bit about carbon capture. I mean,
talk us through the development of that sector and where it's at
now. Sure, I'd be happy to do that. So carbon capture is the
first step in a in a broader term called carbon capture
utilisation and storage as also has some connection to direct
air capture. The entire space has developed greatly over the
last 10 to 15 years. We're now we're actually seeing a lot of
projects being deployed.
Much of that has been driven by policy and a lot of capital. And
of course, innovators like myself that have been able to
bring these kinds of technologies out of the lab
through that pilot phase and are now starting to scale at very
meaningful sizes that are actually having real CO2
impacts. And you're sort of managing to hit what had
previously been quite sort of hard to abate sectors. Tell us
about that. So carbon cure, which I'm the CEO and founder,
works in the cement sector. And cement is what's called a hard
to abate sector. It accounts for about 7% of the
Childs greenhouse gas emissions. And it's not just the size
that's that's the issue here, but it's a very difficult
industry because most of those emissions are not attributed to
energy use. So the burning of fossil fuels, that's actually
the chemical process. So it's really tricky because you need
to develop entirely different toolkits of climate solutions
that may not be as useful in other industries like utilities
or like the power sector. So what carbon cure does is we
actually take CO2, which is the problem in the 1st place, and
reinject that
back into concrete as it's being made. A chemical reaction occurs
where that CO2 which was once released into the atmosphere is
now stored and locked away as a stone within concrete. And it
actually makes the concrete stronger, which provides
concrete producers the ability to lower their cost and still
deliver a green product in the market. We're at a point now
where we're scaling all around the world, but we just can't go
fast enough for the pace of climate change. I mean, but
that's a remarkable innovation, Karen. That's one brilliant
solution to the
the huge spectrum of problems that we're facing. Clearly we
need more talk us through sort of just the the plethora of of
problems that we we need to be addressing. Yeah, one of the
biggest challenges is this this costs money and today you don't
pay for emissions, right? You just admit into the environment
and society bears that cost. But we're trying to move to a world
where we address all of those and in order to fund it, you
need to come up with innovative ways. One of the exciting things
about what carbon cure does is they actually find a way to
usefully
use the CO2, which can actually help bring down costs, make
cement stronger. Yeah, this is a win win. Exactly. There are many
other solutions that that are necessary. The most common is
burial of some sort. Basically, you take CO2, you inject it
underground and it normalises, it stays there forever. But it's
important that we we address multiple different pathways here
because the volumes that we're looking at, multiple gigatons
per year is, is just such a massive quantity that no one
pathway will be sufficient.
And is government policy keeping up with this? What would you
like to see happening on that, on that score? Yeah, it's, it's
it's exciting to see that policies are starting to emerge
that will address both driving demand for removals as well as
supporting how you actually store it long term. But where we
are today is we're not far enough. We need to see more
policy that's going to basically make removal of CO2 a
requirement as opposed to today where it's primarily done
through voluntary means. Basically, today, the leading
companies will choose
to do removals to offset their emissions. We need to get to a
world where much like any other industrial waste, pollution, et
cetera, those who are driving the most pollution have to clean
it up. And there are a lot of different mechanisms that can be
used to drive that. Things like emissions trading schemes,
border, carbon adjustments and many others. Well, thank you
both for joining us with such innovative solutions and hope
for the future.
Karen and Rob, thanks. Thank you. Thank you.