John Pimentel, CEO of 280 Earth, will appear at the Bloomberg Green Festival in July. In his first comments since taking office, he explains why he is aiming for a direct hit.
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(Bloomberg) — Of all the climate technologies in development, direct air capture (DAC) has perhaps the longest reach. Efforts to remove carbon dioxide from ambient air are still in their infancy, with the world’s largest DAC plant currently removing just 4,000 tonnes per year.
This is equivalent to just a few seconds of humanity’s emissions. But cleaning up the atmosphere is crucial to achieving global net zero goals. Many companies, from Microsoft Corp. to Meta Platforms Inc., have already paid millions of dollars to emerging startups to remove future CO2. This is an essential part of your own corporate climate goals.
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John Pimentel is leading one of these moonshot projects as the new CEO of 280 Earth, a DAC startup spun out of Alphabet’s X lab. He believes his startup’s technology circumvents some of the DAC industry’s biggest challenges, such as energy intensity and high costs. The two-year-old company is in the final stages of commissioning its first commercial 500-ton demonstration plant in The Dalles, Oregon.
In his first public conversation since becoming CEO, Pimentel spoke to Bloomberg Green about Earth’s 280 future plans. Pimentel will also be a speaker at the Bloomberg Green Festival, July 10-13 in Seattle.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Before joining 280 Earth, you worked in wastewater treatment and wind and solar energy development. Why did you decide to look at carbon dioxide removal now, after working on three very specific technologies that are needed now?
You even missed a few. I also worked in a municipal waste recycling efficiency company and started in this area in 2002 with a biofuel company called Pacific Ethanol.
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Each of these industries involved unique technologies that were viewed with skepticism when they first appeared on the financial market because of their high cost and lack of experience. Each of these industries went through a process where they started with high risk and low interest from traditional project finance companies and went through a development curve. This led to what you see now: standardized, mature and market-accepted technologies.
I firmly believe that after a few years of studying and working in this area, DAC will follow exactly this pattern.
Why is Direct Air Capture, a highly speculative technology, a priority for Google and its investors, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin?
Anyone who has studied the climate situation understands that we are simply producing more CO2 than our natural environment can absorb and sequester. And even if our governments and companies manage to reduce emissions through measures such as renewable energy and capture the necessary emissions at the source, we will still need to achieve comprehensive carbon removal to reverse the path we are on. So that’s the real interest that Google and our investors have.
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280 Earth’s DAC approach uses waste heat from sources such as data centers. Their pilot plant will be built next to a Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon. What benefit does this have for tech companies like Google with massive data center operations and huge emissions?
The advantage for our industrial partner is the provision of additional cooling services. We get hot water from our waste heat partner and give them cooler water back. So you use less water, less energy and less chemicals. Your equipment will experience less wear and tear, allowing you to use your capital expenditure for longer. There are also other industrial sources of waste heat such as power plants, ethanol plants, chemical refineries, oil refineries and cement plants. Data centers represent an obvious demand opportunity for us due to tremendous growth, but the application will be available to all types of waste heat partners.
Read more: Amazon is betting $150 billion on data centers needed for the AI boom
DAC requires a lot of energy to capture CO2, and the efficiency of this process is low due to the diluted CO2 concentration in the air. How much energy does the Earth’s DAC system require, and where else do you plan to get it outside of waste heat sources?
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As for the current load question, that is proprietary information. We believe our system will be the most efficient energy user of carbon removal engineering solutions.
At this first location in The Dalles, Oregon, we are blessed with renewable electricity from Bonneville Power Administration, powered primarily by hydroelectric, wind and partial nuclear power. One of our location criteria at future locations, especially for large-scale plants, is the ability to accommodate new, renewable energies. We are looking for situations where we can supply the system not only with renewable capacity, but also with new capacity.
And why does it make sense to use renewable energy to power DACs instead of just keeping the lights on?
We do not seek to compete with or take away new renewable capacity coming online. We would like to seek to create new renewable energy capacity, particularly based on our energy needs and our long-term commitment to this facility. So when we think about setting up large-scale plants with a million tons or more, we pay attention to several criteria: firstly, proximity to a place where the CO2 can be sequestered; Secondly, the ability to generate new electricity and thirdly, the waste heat component that helps our system run more efficiently.
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CO2 pipelines faced strong local opposition. Does 280 Earth plan to rely on pipelines at The Dalles or in the future?
In The Dalles we will likely transport the CO2 by rail to where it will be dumped and sequestered. We try to locate future locations close to the warehouse to minimize the amount of piping required. However, there are already a significant number of CO2 pipelines in the United States with an excellent safety record, and we will be happy to join an established pipeline.
Read more: The Midwest is ground zero for the fight over carbon capture pipelines
Will 280 Earth work with oil companies, and are you concerned about DAC’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry?
We are working with some oil companies that plan to permanently sequester the CO2 underground and not use it for enhanced oil production. Frankly, I believe the oil companies are a tremendous resource of underground knowledge and expertise. If we want to put this CO2 back into the ground where it came from, working with oil companies is a smart decision.
Would you allow the carbon captured by your DAC to be used for enhanced oil production?
NO.
What can we expect from 280 Earth next year and what does 280 Earth’s success look like in 10 years?
By the end of the decade, we plan to deploy 10 million tons of DAC capacity, which will be operational by 2030. Our growth plans include a modular system, so our 5,000 tonne module will be online in 2025. In the next 10 years In the coming years we will start all sorts of projects that will have a significant impact on the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
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