As I near the end of my penultimate semester of my MBA in Sustainable Solutions, I’ve been mulling on what brought me to Presidio in the first place. I came because I wanted to change my career. I no longer felt inspired by my day job in HR and I wanted a career that challenged me, allowed me to be creative, and, more than anything, allowed me to feel that I was making a real impact in this world, specifically in the face of climate change. I wanted to feel hopeful about the world because I was doing work that made it better. The reality of studying and working in sustainability, however, can be disillusioning. We are the soldiers fighting the wicked problems of the world, yet these issues – climate change, racism, sexism, biodiversity loss, to name a few, are massive, systemic, intertwined issues that no one person can unravel. We must go into this work with a deep reservoir of hope, and trust that innovation will lead us to the future we believe in. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (Fitzgerald, 1945). In sustainability, we must work diligently to change the world for the better, knowing that it will take much more than our individual impact to do just that.
What has kept me going over the past two-and-a-half years has been learning about companies that are doing the good work in new and innovative ways, government projects that are breaking the status quo, and capital markets that are restructuring for broad impact. Verge Climate Tech conference this Fall was a magnet for these companies and people. Spending the week learning from an entire conference center filled with dreamers and visionary thinkers reinvigorated my sense of hope.
Since the stickiest projects often have the most creative and inspiring solutions, at Verge I focused much of my time attending talks exploring the leading edge of possible: carbon dioxide removal (CDR). In order to qualify as CDR, according to The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, 2nd Edition, “the activity in question must capture CO2 from the atmosphere (Principle 1) and durably store it (Principle 2). It must also be a human intervention, in addition to the Earth’s natural processes (Principle 3)” (Smith et al, 2024, p. 24). And as a recent Trellis article reminds us, “there is no Paris-aligned scenario that does not also require rapid growth in carbon removal in the coming three decades” (Morales, 2024). Scaling carbon dioxide removal solutions, however, has been and continues to be challenging. CDR solutions are often highly capitally intensive. Building a project takes significant time and resources. Adding additional adversity, monitoring and verification (MRV), while necessary to ensure a carbon removal project does what it says it will, can bloat price tags, extend timelines, and increase financial risk, since these technologies are new and projects may fail MRV. And even if the project is funded and verified, scaling these new technologies presents a final, massive challenge, albeit an unavoidable one: in order to stave off the worst of climate change, we need these solutions to scale exponentially in the next few decades.
Over three days at Verge, I found myself drawn to these companies again and again. In the months that followed, two standout sessions have kept me excited long after the presentations concluded.
The winner of the main stage startup pitch competition, Aquarry, was particularly interesting. Aquarry acquires retired mine pit lakes, an environmental asset with very few environmental benefits (and often environmental detriments), and changes the alkalinity to make that lake a carbon sink. Although this solution’s scope is exclusive to pit lakes, it could nonetheless have a major impact, and without notable environmental detriments, precisely because the energy transition will require a significant increase in mining operations (Aquarry, n.d.).
The second session that has stuck with me over the last few months, “Carbon Removal Pathways We Don’t Talk Enough About,” was a discussion with three truly exciting companies: Vaulted Deep, CREW Carbon, and Lithos Carbon, each with their own highly creative, scalable solution. CREW Carbon and Lithos Carbon have innovated how to lock carbon into the earth using natural processes. Lithos Carbon works with farmers to distribute minerals on agricultural land, while CREW Carbon applies a similar process at wastewater treatment sites (Home, 2024; Lithos Carbon, 2023). Vaulted Deep was a completely new idea to me: trapping waste deep underground for geologic sequestration of carbon using oil drilling technology. These companies are at the beginning of their journey of scale, but the technology for each is already proven and their growth potential appears to be massive. I will continue to watch these enterprises as they grow.
The companies discussed above got their start partially thanks to a financing firm mentioned in numerous conference sessions: Frontier. Founded by several major multinational companies including Stripe, Google, and McKinsey, Frontier has proven itself to be a leader by jumpstarting many climate technologies through advanced market commitments (Frontier, n.d.). Advanced market commitments are financial mechanisms used to encourage the development and production of new goods or services, by committing to purchase a certain quantity of a product at a pre-agreed price once it is developed, provided it meets specific standards. By guaranteeing demand, Frontier allows innovators to focus their efforts on technology development with the assurance that their product will have a buyer once they meet the specifications of the agreement. While making these guarantees exposes institutions such as Frontier to risk, developing the technologies we need in order to create a sustainable future would be impossible without these financing options.
The challenges of climate change offer expansive opportunities for reinvention. The companies at Verge prove that the path to a sustainable climate future is paved with creativity and gumption. As William James once said, “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (James, 1907). I look forward to my future work with an inspiring company that keeps thinking in unhabitual ways, and I thank Trellis Group for creating an environment in which these big dreamers could gather. I look forward to many more Verge conferences to come.
Citations
Aquarry: Safe, measurable, durable carbon removal using pit lakes. (n.d.). Aquarry Home Page. Retrieved December 16, 2024, from https://www.aquarry.earth/
Frontier: An advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal. (n.d.). [Home page]. Frontier. Retrieved December 16, 2024, from https://frontierclimate.com/
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1945). The Crack-Up (E. Wilson, Ed.). New Directions.
Home. (2024). [CREW Carbon homepage]. CREW Carbon. https://crewcarbon.com/
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. Longmans, Green, and Co.
Lithos Carbon | Permanent Carbon Capture on Farms. (2023). https://www.lithoscarbon.com/
Morales, M. (2024, July 23). The state of carbon removal in 3 charts. Trellis. https://trellis.net/article/the-state-of-carbon-removal-in-3-charts/
Smith, S. M., Geden, O., Gidden, M. J., Lamb, W. F., Nemet, G. F., Minx, J. C., Buck, H., Burke, J., Cox, E., Edwards, M. R., Fuss, S., Johnstone, I., Müller-Hansen, F., Pongratz, J., Probst, B. S., Roe, S., Schenuit, F., Schulte, I., Vaughan, N. E. (eds.) The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal 2024 – 2nd Edition. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/F85QJ (2024)