How we’re turning pollution into toys, toothpaste and more | Xu Hao

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. It's clear there are so many mind-blowing ideas and solutions already out there for tackling climate change. So how do we scale up the solutions? For climate tech innovator Xu Hao, it's a lot about how we make these solutions profitable. In his talk, he explains that we already have the science to turn, for example, captured CO2 into plastic or even jet fuel. But we need more infrastructure to scale up to accelerate climate action across the globe.

0:48Humans have been using alcohol for thousands of years, but when did we understand it soberly? It wasn't until the 1700s that scientists first discovered the formula of alcohol, C2H5OH, that alcohol finally got its professional LinkedIn profile called ethanol and start working as an important chemical. Advances in engineering and business have since enabled large-scale production of ethanol, and today it is a$114 billion industry. We use it in cosmetics, in fashion, in medicine, in food, and obviously beverages. And it's even more relevant today as fuel and raw material for some of the low-carbon industries.

1:37So why am I telling you about alcohol? Because it is a good example of how science, engineering and business work together to change the world. But it actually took ethanol more than 200 years to do so. We simply couldn't wait that long to tackle our climate challenge. We urgently need to speed up and scale up low-carbon solutions. So my name is Xu Hao, and I lead Tencent's climate change initiatives. We're a major Chinese tech company with products in social media, video games and cloud services. And we also care about climate change. It's not just limited to data center efficiency or sourcing of renewable energy, as important as that is.

2:24My colleagues and I have been working to explore how we could contribute to the acceleration of low-carbon technology innovations. That's why we launched CarbonX program. And three years in, we're actually more optimistic than ever. Why? Because we felt the right answer is not so complicated. We already have lots of innovation in science, in engineering and business. And the secret to further accelerate the process is also simple. Just do them all at once. Let me further explain. First, most of the scientific discoveries needed to decarbonize our economy has already been made. Really. Today, we generate electricity from solar and wind.

3:11We store energy using chemistry or physics. We turn carbon dioxide into all kinds of chemicals. And nuclear fusion is also on the horizon. All right? 100 years already saved. Let me give you a specific example. CRISPR is a genetic seizure that's well-known in the pharmaceutical industry. They use it to edit genetic code, to find cures for diseases and new drugs. But it can be applied to carbon, too. Take Gatsgin, a Chinese startup. They actually apply CRISPR to a certain bacteria called clostridium, so that these little guys can actually feed some carbon dioxide and produce butanol. So why does butanol matter?

3:57Because together with our old friend ethanol, as well as butanol, we actually get ethylene glycol, polyethylene, polypropylene, butoacetate, dibutophosphate, tributocitrate, and many more. A bit lost, right? These are the chemicals that are actually used in paint, clothes, toys, water bottles, furnitures, and the list goes on and on and on. Essential to everyday life, but all made out of fossil fuel today. With clostridium, we could potentially make all of them using carbon dioxide instead. It's really great science. So it's not the science holding us up. What about engineering? Very important, but unglamorous.

4:45Well, engineering requires lots of innovation, too, because we have to replicate a success in the laboratory test tubes and scale up it in a much, much bigger way, from grams to kilograms to tens to millions of tens, eventually a big factory. To do that, engineers often face two challenges. First, how to build a factory faster and cheaper, and then how to operate it effectively. Let's say we want to build a plant that produces 20 ,000 tons of clean chemicals using carbon dioxide. Do we build one big reactor or a few smaller ones? This is where the process engineers come in. How much pressure is needed in these reactors?

5:34What are the flow rates needed for the gases or the liquids so that they are balanced and the production are most effective? How much land such a facility will occupy? How does it integrate with the existing factory? And probably most importantly, how can we build such a plant faster and cheaper? Well, all of these considerations determines the fans, pumps, compressors, reactors, and all the other parts we will use, and whether we could use off-the-shelf standardized equipment. Because otherwise, if we have to design novel parts, it will be much more expensive and often takes much longer. So it's almost like pick up pieces of Lego blocks to build a beautiful model of your own design, Both creativity and discipline are needed at the same time.

6:29Then it comes operational efficiency. Feynman Dynamics is another startup. They actually combine carbon dioxide and green hydrogen to make green hydrocarbons and produce sustainable aviation fuel or stuff that could potentially clean up our flights. So the key is actually a catalyst that can efficiently convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. And the engineering challenge here is how to manufacture such a high-quality catalyst at much bigger volume. So the process is almost like make a fruit smoothie. You need to blend fruits just right to get a delicious drink. But when you try to make much bigger batches, sometimes the blender got too hot or the fruit doesn't mix well, that will jeopardize the taste of our drink.

7:22To tackle this challenge, engineers at Feynman Dynamic actually borrowed practice from pharmaceutical chemistry. They designed a special high-speed mixer that passes the chemicals at really high velocity in a tube and then circulates back the finished product back to the main reactor to make high-quality catalysts. It's almost like you pre-blend avocados and apples first and then put them back into the big blender to get the ultimate drink. So these rather small engineering steps actually enabled Feynman Dynamics to produce their catalyst at industrial scale. So today, SAF is still more than five times more expensive than conventional jet fuel, but with lots of innovation like this and also the production at scale, I believe SAF can beat jet fuel in cost within 10 years' time.

8:26So the engineers are hard at work, but what about business? Because business is all about price, cost, market and profitability. and in order to reduce carbon emission in the scale of gigatons, startups must turn their science and engineering innovation into profitable ventures. But we got plenty of good news here, too. Some of the technology are approaching the moment where they cost the same or even less than the fossil fuel alternative, sometimes without a carbon price. Yuanchu is a startup that makes calcium carbonate. out of carbon dioxide. So calcium carbonate may also sound unfamiliar, but these white powders are actually in our everyday life, from paper to toothpaste to washing powders to car tires.

9:21By using leftover calcium from biomass or the steelmaking industry, Yuan Chu can actually produce high-quality calcium carbonate cheaper than the conventional method, which is digging limestone out of the ground and burning lots of fossil fuel to make it. Great green discount, right? Then sometimes business is all about the size of the eventual market. Moguang is another startup that actually developed this really groundbreaking new material called radioactive cooling. So this material not only reflects 93 percent of sun radiation back, it could achieve additional cooling by radiating the heat back to outer space, leveraging certain wavelengths cooling window.

10:13Guess what requires cooling? Melting glaciers. That's why we launched a pilot project with Mooguang in Daggu Glacier, one of the endangered glaciers near Tibetan Plateau. Over the past three years, the melting has slowed down by as much as 80 percent. But...

10:36But the project itself is actually not a business. Guess what it is? Any surface that requires cooling. So that's your mobile phone, glassware of a building, or data centers. So the great news is, not only Morguan covered Glacier with this material, they already integrated many of their material into hundreds of thousands of mobile phones and sports cameras and expanding to other products very quickly. So there is truly huge market potential. All right, so the science is here, the engineers are hard at work, and the business model are scaling up. So our final question is, can we further accelerate?

11:22Of course we can, simply by bringing together scientists, industry experts, and the business people in the same room So they start to thinking about all the tough questions from the very beginning at the same time. So the scientists will probably ask, how much gigajoule of energy is required to capture one ton of carbon dioxide? The industry expert will ask, how does your technology help me decarbonize my industry, and how does it fit into my factory? And the investor will probably ask, what's your plan to grow your business by 100 times in the next five years? and to go public. This is almost exactly what happened at the Common X program.

12:06Let's just say this productive dialogue, heated debate, sometimes really disagreement can be challenging, but it really helped speed up the process because it got everybody to thinking about everything at the same time, not waiting 200 years like alcohol. Now, remember gas gene and those cute claustridium. We recently launched a clean chemical consortium that brings consumer brands, big chemical companies, and startups like GasGene or Yuanchu to try to make everything out of carbon dioxide. That's also working on science, engineering and business all at once. So by now, hopefully, you guys understand why I felt we should have every reason to be really optimistic, because we already have plenty of scientific discovery, engineering innovation and business models, so that we should be inspired to imagine a world with net zero and clean future, most likely much better than what AI can generate for us today.

13:22Therefore, I'm definitely drunk on the possibility of a better and cleaner future. Cheers, everyone. Thank you.

13:37That was Xu Hao speaking at TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

14:13Thanks for listening.