Interview with Rory Brown & Jasper Wong, Co-Founders of Airhive #57
Capturing CO2 with a whirl
Hi Human,
I’m excited to share the Survivaltech.club’s last interview (at least for now)! I started writing this blog in May 2021 as means of learning about deeptech climate solutions and potentially finding a research-based climate solution that I could commercialize from the lab to the market.
This journey of writing Survivaltech.club has been wonderful. I’ve learned a ton from different sectors and frontier technologies (e.g., decarbonize concrete, chemicals & steelmaking, battery recycling, carbon removal, and critical minerals). Most importantly, I’ve met incredible deeptech/hardware climate founders, investors, researchers, and enthusiasts along the way 💚🧪🔬🌎
I’ll write about this incredible journey in more detail at some point. For now, I want to thank all of you readers (3400!) and the fantastic climate founders and investors who shared their insights in the interviews over the past years. Thank you💚
Stay tuned for my next exciting update!
This interview is with Rory Brown and Jasper Wong, co-founders of Airhive!
Airhive is a UK-based startup on a mission to achieve megaton-scale carbon removal by 2035. It is building a patent-pending direct air capture (DAC) technology that has a 1) rapid CO2 capture rate, 2) low energy requirement, and 3) low capital requirement.
This fall, Airhive was selected as a supplier of carbon removal for Frontier's third round of carbon removal prepurchases. Frontier is an advanced purchase commitment to buy an initial $1B+ of permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030, founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey. Congrats!
Read more about carbon removal and its importance for tackling the climate crisis in Survivaltech.club’s previous articles:
Disclaimer: Pauliina is an angel investor at Airhive.
🚀Opportunities for launching deeptech climate startups
Cradle to Commerce: pre-applications to the Cradle to Commerce program backed by the US Department of Energy are open until December 10, 2023! Apply here.
LabStart: applications to the LabStart program are open until January 10, 2024! Apply here.
🐝Airhive
Airhive is a UK-based startup building a patent-pending direct air capture (DAC) technology that has a 1) rapid CO2 capture rate, 2) low energy requirement, and 3) low capital requirement.
In the past three weeks, Airhive has also announced two upcoming pilots - an 80t system that will be operational in the north of England in Q1 2024, and a 1 Kt system at Deep Sky’s new Alpha facility in Montreal that will be up and running in Q3 2024. There is another kiloton-scale facility in the works too, which will be announced soon. The team aims to scale to multi-megaton scale carbon removal by 2035.
🧠Wisdom from Rory and Jasper
How did you start work in climate?
Jasper
I have two elder sisters who both pursued careers in climate - in meteorology and next-generation energy storage. Their leadership in these fields inspired me to first pursue a career in physics, maths and engineering, and then in climate technologies.
I did my Master’s in environmental fluid mechanics, studying the way that methane hydrates behave under the ocean. While studying for my Master’s, I also had my first touch with R&D. My first research job was at Meatable, a lab-grown meat company in the Netherlands. After my Master’s, I continued to my PhD with a focus on industrial decarbonization, which led me to direct air capture and Airhive.
Rory
I come from an environmentalist family. My father is a geoscientist. My mother, in turn, runs a public garden and does a lot of environmental education on topics like rewilding and the wellbeing benefits of a physical and spiritual connection to nature.
So I grew up hearing grownups talking about plate tectonics and the Kyoto Protocol and spending lots of time in the outdoors, but initially ended up doing something very different careerwise. I went to work overseas in conflict and security, first in the humanitarian sector and then for government in countries like Afghanistan, Somalia and West Africa. There, I started to increasingly see climate change’s effects on people who are already stuck in poverty and often vulnerable to armed conflict - as a kind of stressor on all these other existing challenges. This kick-started for me to pursue work directly tackling the climate crisis, so I went back to school and did another degree in climate and energy.
What’s the founding story of Airhive?
Rory
I did a lot of integrated assessment modeling during my degree and became aware of how the modeling relied quite heavily on carbon removal to stay below 2°C - not to mention staying below 1.5°C - given how tight our remaining carbon budget is. But we have so little carbon removal in practice, so that reliance on a set of approaches with so much scientific and commercial uncertainty felt like real dissonance that most of all need delivery-minded people. I dived into the different techniques and became convinced that DAC had the greatest scale potential. While all carbon removal methods, such as weathering, peatland restoration and afforestation (which is where my academic work focused), are really important, I thought DAC has no inherent biophysical limits for scaling and instead depends primarily on scaling renewable energy technologies that have consistently outpaced deployment estimates. And it also has low “social complexity”, you might say, which is something I know from the international development world is one of the biggest challenges to doing anything at scale.
I knew some of the people in Jasper's research group at Imperial College, which has one of the best Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) research departments in the world, and reached out to them. Jasper and I got talking in January 2022, and then started building Airhive’s DAC technology from July. We also went through Airminers Launchpad accelerator very early on, which really got us going - the Airminers team are some of our favourite people in the world.
Could you tell more about Airhive’s approach to DAC?
Jasper
Airhive’s DAC technology has three main benefits: 1) rapid CO2 capture rate, 2) low energy requirement, and 3) low capital requirement.
Our patent-pending process uses a widely used industrial process called fluidization as the basis for CO2 capture. We run the process in a reactor called a fluidized bed reactor. In the reactor, we have naturally CO2-absorbing minerals (a metal oxide sorbent). We then pass air to the reactor, and the air starts reacting with the minerals very rapidly, capturing CO2.
We have put a lot of emphasis on using good existing supply chains to scale our technology and operations fast. Firstly, our process uses existing industrial equipment, but in creative and new ways. Secondly, we are using widely available minerals (metal oxides). We can use these minerals in our system over many cycles. Once they eventually degrade, we can sell them to industries like cement and steelmaking as feedstock.
Our process creates a pure CO2 stream, which can be either utilized or stored in a geological formation.
DAC is known for requiring a lot of electricity. What is the energy cost and carbon footprint of DAC?
Jasper
The energy cost for DAC depends heavily on the used DAC technology. We aim to minimize energy use and estimate that our energy costs are 30-50% of the total costs.
DAC’s carbon footprint depends mostly on how the electricity has been produced. While it is easy to build techno-economic models that work with abundant renewable energy, it is more challenging to scale that model to have both 1) an abundance of renewable electricity and 2) proximity to geological storage sites. This is one of the core challenges all DAC companies will face, but we aim to minimise exposure to this through a small land footprint.
Rory
A great study by Terlouw et al. 2021 assessing the carbon footprint of DAC showed that running a DAC plant in a European climate with 100% clean electricity would result in ~0.85 tons of net captured CO2 for every 1 gross ton captured. This means that capturing a ton of CO2 would result in 0.15 tons of CO2 emissions, mostly due to materials required for the process and their embedded carbon. But if you run on the average European grid today, you’d be using a large proportion of higher-carbon electricity and the carbon efficiency would be much lower. In some countries, it might be a net-emitting process (ie, you emit more than you remove and store).
So having a constant source of clean electricity is going to be crucial for every DAC company. In the short term, when the grid is not yet entirely clean, DAC companies need to hunt for creative ways to get clean electricity - i.e. some combination of off-grid sources and using low-carbon power purchase agreements.
Jasper
In the long term, the key question here is if the grid can be decarbonized. Once there is clean electricity available, we don’t see challenges with DAC’s carbon footprint. This is especially true for our approach; our lifecycle assessment indicates that with clean electricity (i.e. offshore wind) we have a 98.5% carbon efficiency (i.e. we’d emit only 15 kilos for every ton captured); this is helpful in further driving down our credit price.
What kind of partnerships are you looking for in carbon utilization and geological storage?
Rory
We are working on some cool partnerships across these categories that we’ll be announcing soon. But we’re keen to talk with anyone who wants to off-take CO2, whether to use or to store. For utilization, the key test for us is “is there an alternative way of powering some process or making some product without CO2 in the near term?” If the answer is no, then using air-captured CO2 helps decarbonize without potentially slowing down the transition to some other approach: e.g. we don’t want to slow down the move to EVs.
We are also looking to form partnerships in geological storage, as while utilization is useful, ultimately the vast majority of air-captured CO2 will need to be geologically stored for the full carbon budget impact to be realized. The world needs loads more geological CO2 storage startups and companies.
Medium term, the UK is a good place for Airhive or any other DAC company. The first CO2 transportation pipelines are currently being worked on and are due to open in probably 2027 for both industrial CCS and engineered removals, and overall ambition about CO2 storage is amongst the highest in the world. The UK has also licensed several CO2 storage sites in the North Sea (View the database of potential CO2 storage sites around offshore UK here).
Northern Europe and the North Sea are likely to be a significant hub for DAC + CO2 storage in the next 20 years, as long as North Sea governments and the bigger industries can make progress on building out the infrastructure. The North Sea has great CO2 storage potential and is surrounded by countries with strong regulatory environments.
The carbon offset market has suffered from several scandals, where deforestation credits have been falsely calculated and sold (e.g., Verra, South Pole). How is this affecting carbon removal with engineered approaches?
Rory
I’ll start by saying that avoiding deforestation is unbelievably important. Tackling deforestation is an urgent task not only from the emissions but also from the ecosystem and biodiversity perspectives - if countries’ commitments made at COP26 to end deforestation were successfully implemented by 2030, we’d save ourselves something like 265 Gigatons of emissions over the coming decades, which more than half the remaining carbon budget. Afforestation is also important from both carbon and biodiversity perspectives, although if it’s plantation-based (rather than assisted natural regeneration) that can be problematic for both carbon and biodiversity outcomes.
I hope that how these parts of the voluntary carbon market work improve quickly because of the importance of our forests and ecosystems, and perhaps they need to be reframed more around biodiversity than carbon. And I think it’s a really hard area; my previous career taught me that the sort of programs you need to effectively tackle deforestation or engage in large-scale natural forest or ecosystem restoration, most of which needs to happen in the global south, are faced with wicked social, economic and political challenges which make effective implementation very very hard.
I also hope that carbon credit buyers and governments will start pricing carbon credits on a permanence-adjusted basis to better align with the science of the carbon cycle. If one were to permanence-adjust the carbon removal methods, DAC combined with geological storage likely wouldn't come out as the most expensive - it may in fact be at the lower end of the cost.
But to answer your question, I think there is good momentum on the development of the market for carbon removal even as the voluntary markets for things like avoided deforestation are having some difficulties. And it was great to see the Swiss and US governments start to get into the market as direct buyers; people often have an overly pessimistic view of what governments can do as large-scale procurers (look at defence), but that model of governments complementing innovative private sector buyers like Frontier by directly buying credits is something we’d love to see more of.
How can the Survivaltech.club readers be helpful to Airhive?
Jasper
Do get in touch if you are interested to explore partnerships for interesting use cases of air-captured CO2.
Rory
Come see us in London - we’ll happily have you round to see our lab (our pilots will be spread out across the world) - as it’s always great to meet interesting people building survivaltech🙂.
Thanks Pauliina!
Thank you for reading Survivaltech.club and being on this journey with me!
Best, Pauliina💚
great read, thanks Pauliina for the great interview!