Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom

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1:50Audible makes it easy to drop into your fantasies during your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. There's more to imagine when you listen. Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial. Visit audible.com slash built. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you think about the big ideas out there to fight global climate change, like we often do on this show, What we're talking about fundamentally is reducing the overall amount of carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere. And a big part of that is finding ways to stop adding carbon dioxide to the air in the future, like with clean alternatives to fossil fuels.

2:33But another part of the equation is to remove CO2 that's already been released. And this is where direct carbon capture technology comes in. Back in November of 2023, the first commercial direct carbon capture facility in the U.S. opened in California, and it uses a new method that's fast, relatively inexpensive, and it can be scaled up pretty quickly. The company behind the facility is called Heirloom, and its co-founder is Shashank Samala. Even though the company was only launched in April of 2020, by the end of this decade, Shashank says Heirloom's technology could start to make a meaningful dent in removing CO2 worldwide.

3:14Shashank's background in business began in 2013 when he was just 22 years old. He co-founded an electronics manufacturing company called Tempo Automation, which built circuit boards used in everything from rockets to medical devices to consumer electronics. But even though Tempo had contracts for major clients like NASA, After a while, Shashank found himself wanting to focus on something bigger. You know, several years into starting the business, I realized that, you know, I wanted to work on something that had a much more profound impact on society generally. And, you know, I found that I just couldn't wake up in the morning, be motivated and think that I would be doing this for the rest of my life.

3:59So that's when I started thinking about, okay, sort of what's next. and what are other problems I could help contribute to. I guess in the year after you left your job at Tempo Automation, you joined an organization to be an entrepreneur in residence. And I think this is a climate policy organization. Tell me about what you started to think about during that year. Yeah, so really during some of my last years at Tempo, I was spending my nights and weekends thinking about specifically climate. I grew up in Southeast India, so a lot of the things I was reading about where the worst impacts of climate are faced by the world's most vulnerable people, that resonated with me.

4:46And I knew I wanted to work in climate. So during that journey, I learned about the importance of carbon removal. So, you know, some friends of mine had started this organization called Carbon 180, which is all about finding pathways, both from policy and a technology perspective, to make a dent in this carbon removal problem. So it was really a chance for me to go in and sort of think from 30 ,000 feet. And I was specifically interested in technology methods. So I spent a lot of time talking to scientists, latest research, building cost models, understanding which pathway is the most promising.

5:25Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the challenge we're facing, right? And we've talked about this on the show before, but it would be helpful if you could outline it a little bit, which is global carbon emissions have not been reduced to the targets that have been set in previous years, and they won't be. But in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, we have to not only burn less carbon and release less carbon in the atmosphere, we have to remove it from the atmosphere. We can't do just one or the other. We have to do both, right? Exactly right. We can't just reduce emissions anymore.

6:02It won't be enough to stop climate change. We've emitted too much. And you can't reduce emissions you've already emitted. So we have to start removing some of that carbon from the atmosphere. By some, I mean in the tune of billions of tons of CO2 per year. And so the idea is that eventually, when this can be scaled up, it will start to have a significant impact on carbon levels in the atmosphere. Exactly. When you think about the overall decarbonization formula, you have to decarbonize every single part of the economy. You have to decarbonize electricity by going from fossil fuels to solar and wind and hydro and so forth.

6:46You have to decarbonize agriculture, shipping, aviation, steel, concrete, etc. And in this formula, there is a few sectors that are hard to abate. So because some of those sectors will be slow to decarbonize, we need to complement them by removing carbon from the air. So you started to look at carbon capture, carbon removal as a possible sort of a solution. And you have, I mean, you had a background in computers and design, robotics. So, but from an engineering standpoint or perspective, this is a different problem to solve. So how did you even start to go about thinking about, you know, how to make this work?

7:31Yeah, that's a great question. So my background coming in was manufacturing and robotics and automation. And this problem set is mostly chemical engineering, process engineering, something that I hadn't done professionally. A lot of it was me relearning high school chemistry and brushing up on fundamental thermodynamics and heat of reactions and so forth. So, you know, I wasn't the expert in them. I didn't have my PhD. But I do think the fact that I came in from a third-party perspective gave me the chance to evaluate all these different methods and approaches in a very unbiased way, right? So, you know, for me, because I come from manufacturing where, you know, which has thin margins and you really have to know where the cents and dimes go, you know, I was evaluating each of these approaches through a robust cost model that I built from the ground up.

8:27So, yeah, it was fun just really learning a lot of the science. So, all right, let's talk about carbon capture because there are and this technology has been around for some time, you know, and essentially I think what most of us think about in carbon capture is like giant, you know, sort of let's just imagine like a shipping container with huge fans on top of these containers. and they suck in air and they essentially filter out the carbon, which is then pumped underground. And there's a company we've done on the show, Climeworks, that does this in Iceland. This was not the model you were thinking about, right?

9:12Yeah, that's right. So for me, I didn't have any existing mental model for how to remove carbon from the air. For me, what really mattered most was cost and scalability. So I was looking at each one of these approaches from that perspective. So there are many different ways that people were trying to pull carbon from the air, but the CO2 in the air is very dilute. You're pulling one molecule of CO2 out of every 2 ,500 molecules. So fundamentally, it's an expensive gas separation problem. So the traditional way folks have gone about it was basically to build a novel material artificially. But the problem was not whether you could capture the CO2.

9:55The problem was the cost of making that material. And because the supply chains don't exist, you often had to use these exotic, hard to find materials. So, you know, if you ever want to pull billions of tons from the air, the infrastructure wasn't just just wasn't there. It would have been massive and expensive. So we came at it from a different perspective, which was, you know, how do we enhance nature? How do we, you know, are there things that we can borrow from nature, you know, basically for free to solve the same problem? We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Heirloom comes up with a more natural solution to the carbon removal problem.

10:32One that could be low cost and massively scalable. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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13:51Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Heirloom co-founder and CEO Shashank Samala. Heirloom's technology takes CO2 from the air in order to reverse some of the climate effects from centuries of burning fossil fuels. All right, so I mentioned Climeworks, which is another carbon removal company that operates in Iceland. But the technology that they're working with, I guess you decided to take somewhat of a different approach. Because, of course, from what I understand, for that kind of model to work at scale, you need to cover the Sahara Desert in these shipping containers sucking air out, constantly filtering it out.

14:28And even then, part of it feels like a drop in the bucket, or a drop in the ocean, I should say. It's like you're removing just a tiny bit of carbon from the atmosphere. But by and large, that has been the model for decarbonization. Yeah, I think in general, decarbonization and carbon removal both have to be done in a distributed way all across the world. It will all seem small in any given location, but collectively, they will amount to billions of tons. I mean, that's how we emit today CO2. Like, if you think about that question, like, what does society actually make billions of tons of, like in mass?

15:07Like, can you think about a few things? I mean, I would think cement, for example, construction material. Yeah. So it's three things. It's cement, steel, and fossil fuels. Those are the only three things that - That we make in billions of tons. Okay. Exactly. I mean, just think about that. Even food or rice, there's in the millions or hundreds of millions. But when you think about doing things at a billion ton scale, which we have to, removing carbon from the air, Like you have to have this mindset of cost and scalability through and through. And that basically, if you have that lens, you end up filtering out most things that you see.

15:46So as you started to look at what you could possibly do, tell me what you landed on. Because the model that you ended up, because you founded this company not very long ago, but the model is not about sucking air from the atmosphere. Yeah. So, I mean, we're still sort of removing carbon from the atmosphere, but sort of not in the most traditional way. So the first hypothesis was, if you want to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air, whatever the sponge you use has to be abundant and very, very cheap and close to free as possible. and in that journey we found that carbonates you know magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate are some of the most abundant materials on the planet that also have something called alkalinity which is the ability to to be very thirsty for co2 if you will so we found that limestone specifically is you know you can get this stuff for like 30 40 bucks a ton there's trillions of tons of limestone across the world.

16:53There's 4 % of the Earth's crust. And we picked this and we realized that, okay, limestone is available. It is cheap. We can use this as a sponge. And what we realized is that even that wasn't enough. We needed to figure out how to enhance it, how to give it superpowers, how to supercharge it to remove carbon much faster than it naturally would. Just to clarify, because obviously I'm not a scientist, but I'm assuming when you talk about limestone, you're essentially talking about it behaving like a sponge, like a dry sponge in water, except you put the limestone, you just stick it outside and it naturally absorbs carbon?

17:39Yeah. So limestone by itself is a sponge already with water, right? So the first thing that we do effectively is give it superpowers by first baking it in a kiln, right? So effectively, we pull the water out of a sponge and it turns into calcium oxide, which is lime. And lime is very thirsty for CO2. And that is what we effectively expose to the air to pull CO2 from the air. All right. So just to understand the heirloom technology, because again, it's a different method from some of the other carbon capture companies. You're heating up limestone in order to turn it into calcium oxide. And then what happens?

18:24So when you bake limestone in the kiln, the output, the lime, is super thirsty for CO2. Like it wants to be naturally stable by pulling carbon from the air. Right. So that property is what we take advantage of by taking thin layers of lime and placing them on trays. So imagine very large baking trays, right? And we stack these baking trays vertically to, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 feet. And you effectively have a very tall baking rack with trays with thin layers of lime. And as the air passes through, basically gobbles up that CO2. And in a few days, it turns into calcium carbonate, which is limestone, which is exactly what you started with.

19:15So that's how we capture the CO2. All right. So you've got this technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And it's a different way of doing it. It's using limestone. And let's talk about the business side of this, right? I know you've raised about a little over$50 million to get this off the ground. And tell me how the business model works, what you sell and how you essentially make money. Yeah. So, you know, today our customers are corporations with carbon net zero targets and soon corporations with compliance requirements to become net zero. So today we have customers like Microsoft and Stripe, Meta, who are buying remodels from us to help them reach net zero.

19:56So they've made commitments to be net zero. They pay you money to remove carbon from the atmosphere to reduce their output, their output of emissions. Exactly. So for a company like Microsoft, which has a lot of emissions from things like running data centers, they're buying as much renewable energy and decarbonizing as much as they possibly can. And what they realize is that the last 30, 40 % of the emissions, they have to remove from the air. And that's why they come to us and they buy carbon removals. So let's talk about the opportunities here. I mean, right now, this is not required. These are just companies making voluntary decisions.

20:36There's no cap-and-trade system in the United States. And there's a limited version in Europe. But tell me where you see this opportunity headed. I think in general, if you want to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air, there has to be compliance markets in a very large way, You know, not just in Europe, but also in the US and, you know, basically every other country. But, you know, in the short term, you're exactly right. There's lots of corporations who either have net zero targets or see compliance targets coming down the pipe and are getting ready to buy removals. So I actually just came off from a call with a customer who's a shipping company.

21:18And they basically told us that to send ships into and out of Europe, they have to buy carbon removals and have to reach a set of emissions targets year by year for the next 10, 20 years. So, you know, what we are seeing is that actually, I think there's a really good survey that Boston Consulting Group did on the demand for carbon removals. You know, what they saw is that just from the voluntary carbon markets, there is a massive shortfall in the projected supply of carbon removals in 2030. So how big is the potential for this market? Well, you know, at least to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to remove anywhere from 5 to 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air.

22:07So if you think about the overall climate math, right, we emit 50 billion tons a year. And if we can get 80 to 90 % of the way through with decarbonization and reduction, you're left with 5 to 10 billion tons that you have to remove from the air. So we think that in the medium to long term, the carbon price is likely going to be in the$100 to$200 per ton mark. And at that cost for 5 to 10 billion tons, we were talking about a trillion dollars worth of carbon removal industry. Right now, it's about 600, some say as high as$1 ,000 per ton to remove carbon. So the costs are really prohibitively high in some cases, but the goal is to get it down to$100 a ton.

22:52Right. I mean, that's really the magic number, right? And that's really the lens that we've taken from the beginning, where it actually gets it to 100 bucks a ton. At the end of the day, what we're doing is just putting a bunch of rocks and a bunch of trays, right? That's why we think that going for simplicity and scalability, and if you ever want to reach billions of tons, it has to be affordable by society. It cannot be 500, 700 bucks a ton. It has to be much lower. And I think that's really how you get to make a lot of impact in the world. It has to be incredibly accessible. When we come back after the break, Shashank's plans to build carbon capture facilities all across the United States and eventually the world.

23:36Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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26:13Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is the co-founder and CEO of the direct carbon capture company, Heirloom. So, all right, so right now you've got a facility up and running in the, I think it's the first commercial facility in the U.S., right? Yeah, so this is the first directorate capture facility in North America that captures and stores CO2 from the air. It's, you know, it's small, but what we think it is, it's a blueprint of what we think carbon removal at scale looks like. You know, there's lots of things that we learned along the way, right? Actually putting steel in the ground and building projects is very different than being, you know, building prototypes and experimenting with science in the lab.

26:56Obviously, both are important, but that's what we learned this year. And this is in Tracy, California. So how much carbon is it? I mean, is it operating now as we speak? Yes, it's operating now. So the capture capacity is about 1 ,000 tons a year. It's a modular system. We deployed about 24 units. And next year, we're increasing at least by 10x, building another facility. And what happens to those limestone panels once they've absorbed all the carbon? Yeah. So after the limestone absorbs the carbon from the air, we put it back in the oven to heat it up and pull out the CO2 it captured from the air.