The Exchanges

Q We've been focused mostly on the U.S., We're both based here. A lot of the data center build out is here, and we have 45 Q. How much is happening internationally on this?

A So, great question. Glad you asked. Uh, first stop is our friends to the north in Canada. They have a substantial investment tax credit. 60% ITC for carbon capture technology. That goes a long way. And in fact, it is not impossible that the first, uh, integrated natural gas with CCS data center project will be in some place like Uh, Saskatchewan or Manitoba or Alberta. Second, uh, look, uh, overseas. The UK is very interested in this, and they are building these industrial hubs. So in addition to the Teesside project, which I mentioned, that's being supported with a contract for differences policy. That kind of support becomes a magnet. You're going to see more of these plants there. In part, that's a way to both have the UK meet its targets, Displace coal and also serve the domestic natural gas industry. Not to be outdone, our friends in the Gulf states, the MENA region, this is a hot topic. They are very interested in attracting hyperscalers and data centers. They have poor volume. They have natural gas. So look to Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar. They're all working this up in real time. Uh, not to be outdone, Even though they don't have natural gas resources, look to Japan and Korea. They sell the technology. So they want to sell the turbines, they want to sell the capture tech, they want to sell the EPC contract, and they will do that in a place like Northwestern Austral…

AI assessment note: “first stop is our friends to the north in Canada. They have a substantial investment”

Q We'll talk about the specific things that are not crazy and what's happening in those in just a moment, but how do you define what is and what is not crazy in this context?

A Right, so in this regard, I am very much a student of Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, who is the Principal Deputy of Assistant Secretary at the Department of Energy. Dr. Wilcox years ago said Hey, second law of thermodynamics, that's non-negotiable. Everything else is negotiable. So the first cut at this is, does it make sense according to the second law of thermodynamics? Are you just going to waste a bunch of energy and money turning it into stuff? And as a consequence, the very first hit in utilization space is, can we turn CO₂ into stuff That requires no additional energy. And the answer is yes. Mostly you can turn it into concrete. You can turn it into aggregate. You can turn it into sand. You can turn it into stuff that we use huge volumes of. Every year the world uses thirty billion tons of concrete. So turning CO two into concrete is a gigaton market, and it's not nuts. It actually releases energy. And in that context, you can scale that in a complex way, but it's straightforward. There's no magic involved, and now there's hundreds of companies that turn CO₂ into those kinds of products. The other thing that you can turn CO₂ into is fuel, or chemicals. In order to do that, you need to add a lot of energy. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people figured out immediately, it better be clean energy, or we're wasting everybody's time. So, it better be energy that has very low carbon emissions,…

AI assessment note: “the first cut at this is, does it make sense according to the second law”

Q ammonia decarbonizing all these sectors from happening, what do you think it's most likely to be? Is it the renewables to produce the hydrogen? Is it the, that we learn a lot more about ammonia, uh, and discover it has a bunch of additional problems and actually we shouldn't be using it? Is it the bunkering infrastructure? Is it just policy? Like, what's the thing that stops this from happening?

A Right, so I wouldn't say that stops it from happening, but I would say that slows it substantially, right? I think that inevitably we will have low-carbon ammonia, if for nothing else, for fertilizer, right? And eventually, like, the next big thing will be maritime shipping, and I think we're, those will happen for real. Um, that said, um, What's likely to slow it down is actually human capital. You need specialty welders to do this for storage tanks. Like, where are they coming from? If we're going to put in a bunch of green hydrogen infrastructure, we need the electricians to do it. Where are they? Right? We, we actually have a human capital problem on everything from making transformers to underwater welders for ports. Like, we just, we don't have a lot of the stuff that we would like to have at the volume that we need. And since we're going to be building in places like Namibia, and Chile, and Nigeria, like, we have a human capital shortage in those places where people will want to be trained, and people will want to make those things carefully and well in those locations. Uh, to avoid sort of the worst colonial excesses, we want wealth to go to those nations, and so that means that they need the jobs, they need the training, they need the expertise, it'll take some time to do that. I am really worried about the infrastructure choke points as well. I really think bunkering …

AI assessment note: “What's likely to slow it down is actually human capital.”

Q The one category of uses for this biomass that we have not talked about is turning it into plastic or other consumer goods, but I think particularly bioplastic because that's been, there's been a bunch of attention paid to that space of late. What do you make of that pathway?

A Um, again, reasonable people can disagree. Let me give you my take. First of all, again, if you can do it, you should. That's good. We should be thinking about price. We should be thinking about life cycle, full life cycle, not just carbon, but other environmental impacts. You got to think about all that stuff. But, uh, in full transparency, one of our companies, Solugen, an investment we made at Carbon Direct, does exactly that. They turn biomass into all kinds of chemicals and products, including plastics. So that's great. And if you can use that to displace, ah, a fossil feedstock, then in fact you're doing something positive for climate. It is also the case that the total mass of plastics produced every year is about one billion tons. So the entire plastics market is barely climate relevant. So if you're thinking about something that can deliver a big climate solution, bioplastics isn't it. You cannot balance the atmosphere's needs on making yoga pants and hoodies. You know, it's just not going to work that way, but that's okay. It is positive, not just for climate, if you can do that a little bit, it is also positive to get people in the game. If people want to start virtue signaling by buying plastic bottles made out of recycled plastic, or out of bioplastics made from the air, Do you see, in general, in

AI assessment note: “if you're thinking about something that can deliver a big climate solution, bioplastics isn't it.”

Q everybody tests on a flue gas stack for natural gas, and a lot of the stuff that we are actually deploying is, has other weird contaminants, natural gas doesn't, but do you view the technology risk on, uh, on, I don't know how these sorbents are going to perform or their lifetime, whatever, for natural gas as, as being effectively retired already, or do we need to see it first?

A Yeah, it's better than that, actually. So let's start with the established technologies. There's a handful of companies that will today sell you a big facility with a performance guarantee and a wrapper, and they will sell you like up to ten million tons of capture a year. They will sell you big facilities. These are Fleur, Schlumberger Acker, Shell CanSolve, and Mitsubishi. These are all liquid solvent technologies, but that technology is in the, in the basket. It's done. Okay. Behind them are the next generation of technologies, which are in fact really kind of being built for natural gas. So another solvent technology, ion technology, a different kind of liquid solvent cans of, sorry, capsule out of Norway. There's also physical sorbent technologies like Svante. Um, there's cryogenic technologies, uh, like Frost CC. There's, uh, what's the other one? Oh, membranes. There's a, there's a bunch of companies selling CO two capture membranes. Interestingly, each of those has a different sweet spot in this ecosystem. So, One of the things we are beginning to see is many of the powers, hyperscalers are saying, you know what, let's start small. Let's go with 50 or a hundred megawatts. If that's the case, you're not going to call Mitsubishi. It's the wrong technology. It's too big, actually, for the, for the plant that size. But if you're building a 50 to a hundred megawatt power pla…

AI assessment note: “that technology is in the, in the basket. It's done.”

Q All right, so we've covered two categories here of, of utilization, um, fuels and building materials, or like built environment. Materials from concrete to building materials. Are there any others that you think are worthy of inclusion here? Because people are talking about using CO to, as you said, you could make almost anything with it theoretically.

A So there's two other categories I want to give to your listeners. One of them is the not crazy stuff that is a little bit over the horizon, ok? So one example of that is polycarbonate, which is a potential substitute for glass. So there's a bunch of things that we make out of glass today. You can make that out of CO₂, even though there's no CO₂ in glass. You have a material swap. So you take, you use less of one kind of material that is energy or carbon intensive, you use more of another one that's built out of recycled CO₂. Polycarbonate glass is an example of that. Turning it into carbon fiber and making synthetic rebar is another one. You displace structural steel, some fraction of it, by putting these other materials in, ok? For those pathways, it's a short length. Uh, those are, again, small margin commodities. It's hard to make a lot of money or business doing that, but you have an existing market. If you can get the offtakes, if you can get people to buy the green premium, you can do what I just said. So that is not turning CO two into stuff that already has carbon. That's turning CO two into stuff that's a replacement for something else. And that is part of sort of a broader sort of material substitution strategy that many countries and companies and governments are trying to figure out, you know, how much of that should we do. That is challenging, but again, straightfo…

AI assessment note: “there's two other categories I want to give to your listeners.”

Q And those are, of those 47, like what, 45 or point source? Basically?

A Yes. Most of the CO₂ capture that is done is where CO₂ is concentrated. There is an economic cost to separating and concentrating CO₂. So you tend to start where you already have a separated and concentrated source of CO₂. Ethanol plants, hydrogen facilities, natural gas processing facilities are the places that most of this is done today. Increasingly, though, Again, for climate, we are starting to capture from dilute sources. Those dilute sources are also representative of point sources, so a coal-fired power plant, or a natural gas plant, or a steel mill, or some other kind of place. There are a couple of places, though, where we are pulling CO₂ out of the air and oceans, and we are doing that because we know we have to. And because people will pay for it. And there are a couple of those around the world now, and there's many more coming online quickly.

AI assessment note: “Yes. Most of the CO₂ capture that is done is where CO₂ is concentrated.”

Q develop horizontal infrastructure in the United States, it's not dissimilar from what, from what happens when we try to build transmission lines, for example. So to what extent does that pose, you think, a real challenge for this CO two, whether utilization or sequestration future, our ability to build the infrastructure required, the mainstream required to get it from where we capture it to where we use or sequester it?

A This is a very real concern. There are ways to work through it. I believe we will overcome some of these challenges and problems. There will be places where we don't. And we're sort of running that experiment in real time. So let me talk about a couple of examples where I think we are seeing what this could look like. One of them is, there was announcement just a couple of days ago, a portion of the summit pipeline, a company called Tallgrass, is going to capture CO₂ in Nebraska and store it in Colorado. They are repurposing an existing natural gas pipeline to do that. There has been a back and forth about a community benefits package and an agreement, a group called Bold Alliance, or Or bold, uh, Nebraska has been sort of Uh, intervening into this process. Uh, there's been questions about how do you represent the landholders in a fair and just way? All these questions. Punchline, they cut a deal a couple of days ago, and they made a community benefits agreement that, A, agrees to, like, a transparent monitoring process that gives money to NGOs and groups in the community that would benefit, that trains first responders on how to do this, plus, once the thing's operating, a royalty agreement so that the landholders get some value. I expect we're going to be seeing more of these kinds of things. That's not yes in every community, but it does mean that there will be some communit…

AI assessment note: “This is a very real concern. There are ways to work through it.”

Q Well, you're assuming Twitter is still worth forty-four billion dollars, which I think is, is not necessarily a safe assumption. Nonetheless, I agree with you that its impact on the world, I mean, there, there's a fairly strong case to be made that the production of ammonia might have been one of the, I don't know, two or three most important inventions of the past couple centuries, right?

A Oh, I would put it at the top invention of the 20th century. No question. Number one invention of the 20th century. Uh, we'll see what happens in the 21st century, but, uh, uh, this has, has been, like, immensely important. Also something that most people don't know about ammonia, it can be a fuel, and that's part of the reason why people are interested so much in it today. There are already about 200, uh, shipping terminals that, that, that ship ammonia to receiving terminals. Um, so there's already a big infrastructure to it. There's ships that move ammonia around, but mostly that's for fertilizer. As we get to net zero, though, the thing that people like about ammonia is there's not a carbon atom in it. So you can use it as a fuel, and it itself does not emit carbon. That's a big feature these days. And we, I know we're going to get into this more, but, uh, that is what's driving a lot of the interest in ammonia these days, and it's what makes it interesting to talk about in a completely new set of applications.

AI assessment note: “Oh, I would put it at the top invention of the 20th century.”

Q there was a winner. There's a winner for jet fuel today, and there's a winner for, for, uh, for shipping fuel. Is there any reason to think that wouldn't ultimately be the case in the future? Like, what is, what is the reason why, 20 years from now, we would end up with, A bunch of infrastructure to support methanol shipping, and a bunch of infrastructure to support ammonia shipping.

A Right, so for transportation fuels, things like planes are the outliers. Instead, look at China, or look at Europe, they have a lot of gasoline, they have a lot of diesel, they have a lot of methanol. They use all of these fuels for transportation. And they use, they have different infrastructure, they have different versions of doing this, and it's for different reasons. For cars, gasoline is broadly a better fuel, although in Europe, they use diesel for a lot of cars. We know all about that from Dieselgate and so forth. In trucking, diesel is the overall winner, but people have been looking at alternative fuels for trucking as well, including hydrogen. So I am less, for the case of Planes. Planes have such a specific need for lightweight, energy-intensive fuels and duty cycles. Like, that is a real thing. And I think it is going to continue to be the case that Jet A is going to be the winner, and synthetic fuels of all stripes still have to make Jet A. Like, that's the thing you're going to do. But for shipping, because there's different ways in which shipping is used, like the operations of a port are very different than trans-Pacific shipping, um, I think you are going to see a range of applications. Over the long haul, like by 28, I don't know. I can imagine ammonia will win at the end of that day, and that that will be a gradual, like, vintage replacement thing. As the en…

AI assessment note: “in twenty-fifty, I think we're going to end up with a blend of both”

Q we're putting the cart before the horse a little bit. If we get too excited about shipping ammonia around to decarbonize things, using it to run power plants, using it to Uh, decarbonize shipping, all that. If we don't first get a really solid handle on, we, we need zero carbon ammonia production. Like, that seems like a first order problem to me. Do you think about it that way?

A Uh, whether or not it's the heart cart before the horse, it is the case that that horse has left the stable. Basically, the government of Japan has said, we will buy low carbon ammonia at a premium, and we will use it to decarbonize our existing infrastructure. This was part of the rationale, actually, for writing our report. The Japanese government wanted to know not only how to make low carbon ammonia, but how to use it, and part of the reason why is because they have already committed to throwing it into their power plants. They will do co-firing of their coal plants. They will do co-firing of their natural gas plants with ammonia as a fuel, and if they have low carbon ammonia feed, then they will have low carbon electricity production, and because Japan has very few options, They've shut down their nuclear plants. They have no place to store CO two. They have lousy renewable resources. This is very important for their net zero strategy. Korea is right behind them. Singapore is right behind them. So we're seeing economies around the world paying a green premium for low carbon ammonia as a fuel. Because Japan is a maritime nation, and they build a lot of ships, they are also looking at this from an industrial economy perspective. They want to sell ammonia ships. They want to sell more ships that move ammonia. They want to sell ship engines to use ammonia as a maritime fuel. B…

AI assessment note: “whether or not it's the heart cart before the horse, it is the case that that horse has left the stable.”

Q there. So then the question, of course, is if we're going to build this natural gas, there's kind of no way around it, or at least that is a perception, then should we be throwing carbon capture on it? And, and so I guess the first question there is, is anybody in data center world already talking about that? Are there announced projects that would be natural gas with CCS?

A Are they talking about it? Yes. Are there announced projects? No. Um, but we are getting a lot of inbound on this exact topic, and we are talking to, if not all of the hyperscalers, almost all of the hyperscalers. We're talking also to private groups that are developing energy parks for data centers and other electricity offerings. We are talking to utilities. This is very much of great interest to people. Um, Some of the reason why things have not been announced is just because it takes time to put these things together. Some of the reason is that there is uncertainty out there. There's uncertainty around things like . . . There's uncertainty around the speed of permitting wells, but there is a great deal of interest, especially in North America, but not exclusively North America.

AI assessment note: “Are they talking about it? Yes. Are there announced projects? No.”

Q way that people talked for a while about hydrogen ready turbines that are going, you know, very few people are actually doing significant hydrogen blending in those gas turbines at this point. Is that given that there are zero current active natural gas CCS projects, when you hear people starting to talk about that, or even if you start to see announcements, how much credence do you put in them?

A Let me start by saying this is a reasonable concern. Uh, we've been talking about carbon capture power plants for a long time. My friend from the Natural Resources Defense Council, David Hawkins, said, hey, if the power plant is capture ready, my driveway is Ferrari ready. Come on in. I, I do think that this moment is a little different for a couple of reasons. One, um, we're building the gas plants anyways. They're being built So it's not a question of do you do A versus B. We're already doing A. We're just emitting uncontrolled. So actually, I give the builders and the hyperscalers a lot of credit for keeping the eye on carbon. They don't have to, but they really do care about their corporate commitments. They're really focused on keeping the emissions down. But they can't wait. They have to build as fast as they can. The second thing is, again, we couldn't get paid in the past. Now we can. 45 Q exists. An interesting aspect of this actually is that the hyperscalers are also willing to pay a premium for the clean. In the way that they would with nuclear. But they can build a natural gas with CCS plant in roughly half the time in which they could build a nuclear plant. Um, and the third thing I would say is that we aren't going to do this everywhere, but it's not kicking the can down the road. It's kind of the opposite. It is taking responsibility for your emissions. It is act…

AI assessment note: “I do think that this moment is a little different for a couple of reasons.”

Q Okay, so final question for you. We probably can't avoid talking about this. We're obviously at a particular moment in time in US politics. Um, what have we seen so far from this administration and this Congress that would affect the likelihood of build-out, the ease of build-out of natural gas with CCS in either direction?

A So first from the administration, uh, We, there's a lot of stuff that I just won't go into, because it's so rapidly changing, and it's not particularly useful, but, um, we are seeing, uh, Secretary Wright propose a set of cuts to programs that were approved by Congress and approved by the prior DOE. In some cases, Congress, I mean, uh, the contracts have already been made, and this is part of the broader rescission around clean energy. It's the DOGE push, and Uh, frankly, that's, in my humble opinion, an error. The United States is a global leader in this technology. If we want energy dominance, this is what it looks like, right? We should be the world leader in these technologies and deploying them and providing services, etc. And if we don't, these other countries, like the Middle East and Japan, are ready to go. Like, they will just do this. Um, the Problem with that sensibility is it will chill projects everywhere. We'll lose a decade of investment. If that money gets raked back, people who've put tens of millions of dollars into feed study, people who've been working on permits, they'll just bolt. And we're going to lose a generation of workers and a generation of projects.

AI assessment note: “the Problem with that sensibility is it will chill projects everywhere.”

Q you're fairly bullish that we are going to be scaling up sequestration, underground sequestration capacity in a lot of countries. I guess one question, given what you said, right? IPCC expects seven gigatons in total, and six and a half of that is going to be sequestered underground. Why not seven? Like, why are we diverting any of it? Why is it not, not all effectively landfilled, quote unquote, underground?

A The short reason why is because there's a couple of smart things you can do with CO₂. That help in other dimensions. Um, you can turn CO₂ into pretty much anything. If your listeners look around the room, anything that is not glass or metal is made out of carbon. Doesn't have to be made out of carbon from oil or gas or coal. It could be made from carbon of any kind, from plants, from the air. And over the past 20 years, a lot of effort has gone into technology development and company development and infrastructure development that suits that use pathway. CO₂ use, CO₂ recycling, CO₂ utilization, call it what you want. But there's a handful of stuff that's not crazy. That you can turn CO₂ into that makes economic sense, that makes environmental sense, and on that basis, we are starting this process of turning CO₂ into the built world.

AI assessment note: “The short reason why is because there's a couple of smart things you can do with CO₂.”

Q Wait, so, uh, is that, if that is true, is it, is it possible that, that at some point we decide to do a form of geoengineering via releasing a bunch of ammonia into the atmosphere?

A No, I really do not think that will happen. But, but again, but that just gives you a little bit of information on the state of knowledge. Like, if ammonia gets in the atmosphere, does it make global warming greater or smaller? Like, we don't know the answer to that. And it could be that more study reveals, oh my god, this is a huge problem. In which case, like, we would want to put the brakes on that, and we would want to regulate it quite differently. Um, so, we learned that with natural gas leakage. We are learning it today with hydrogen leakage. If ammonia leakage has similar kinds of problems, I think we'd want to know that sooner rather than later.

AI assessment note: “No, I really do not think that will happen.”

Q are the challenges in doing that? And I think one thing that people often imagine is that you can, if you produce clean hydrogen, for example, off of electrolysis or whatever other process you want, um, you could just like, you know, rip and replace into an existing Haber-Bosch plant with your clean hydrogen and now you've decarbonized your ammonia. Is that true or is it more complex than that?

A It's kind of true. So let's, let's, uh, take it apart. So for starters, uh, we are making it today from methane, and we're venting the CO₂. A first useful consideration is should you just capture that CO₂ and store it, keep it out of the atmosphere? And in a bunch of places, that will be the fastest, cheapest way to decarbonize. That only typically gets you 60% decarbonization. You need to spend a lot more money to capture more of the CO₂, and you need the infrastructure, blah, blah, blah, there's challenges. Um, it is also true that you can do rip and replace. You could get rid of the fossil part and put in the green electrolysis. That would require huge amounts of very low carbon electricity, either a hundred percent renewables or a full-time nuclear power plant or something like that. To make the green hydrogen. Typically, in most markets, that'll cost you quite a bit more. At a minimum, that'll cost you, like, two X more. More likely, in most markets, five to eight X more. Okay?

AI assessment note: “It's kind of true. So let's, let's, uh, take it apart.”

Q and then the other thing we should do just in setting this up, biomass is not monolithic. There's, it's, it's, in fact, fairly complicated. There are many different types of plants, and they're used for different purposes once humans stepped onto the scene and started screwing with them. So how do you think about breaking down the categories of biomass? Like, what are the right ways to think about that?

A Right, so, People in their head have some ideal imagining of biomass when they say the word, typically some kind of a forest, and it might be a monoculture working forest where people harvest timber, or it might be a tropical rainforest that is full of diversity of all kinds. In point of fact, it represents those things and many other things. It represents the fungi that are in soils. It represents kelp in the oceans. It represents diatoms and algae. It represents all kinds of, uh, stuff that moves through nature and that lives in nature. Mostly, though, we're talking about plants when we talk about biomass, and mostly we're talking about fairly big plants that are durable on a plant life cycle, but not necessarily durable on a geological time cycle. So things like Uh, oak tree, uh, or things like chaparral scrub, or things like grass and grasslands. These are the kinds of things that are in biomass, and we use them in different ways, and they represent different climates, ecosystems, and so forth. That's why it's all complicated.

AI assessment note: “things like Uh, oak tree, uh, or things like chaparral scrub”

Q What has been the response from, I mean, I guess to the extent that projects are being announced or planned, or we can speculate on this if not, um, the response from local communities? To these kinds of projects. I mean, whether the natural gas projects that are being built in the first place or adding CCS to them.

A Right. So, uh, for starters, again, let me reiterate the natural gas plants are being built. That is happening. Right. Uh, and everything associated with them, the upstream fugitive emissions for where that's a problem, that's still happening. So the communities are facing this choice where they're like, well, we haven't stopped the project. We can't stop the project. What should we be thinking about? And I've been pleased to see at least some of them are open to the idea of CCS. Most communities still don't understand what it is. They don't understand how it can benefit their community. The community benefits are at best opaque, at worst, complicated. I'm pleased, again, to see the groups that are doing this are leaning forward pretty heavily. Not just the hyperscalers, but their partners, companies they're working with. They are walking the walk of going to communities. Many of these communities want the revenues, they want the jobs, they want a cleaner, uh, environment, and in fact, if you have a natural gas plant that's running uncontrolled, carbon capture reduces the pollutant load. So we're starting to see some traction. It is very much one by one. This is a retail discussion. You have to really understand each community, engage them where they are, and see what's going on. Mostly, though, I'm happy to see that this is happening. Um, and the most Committed people are putt…

AI assessment note: “I've been pleased to see at least some of them are open to the idea”

Q pursuing it. And on the other hand, like meeting the urgency of the problem and not being able to wait around 10 years on an academic timeline to Feel like we have everything buttoned up? Like, this is a very general question, but how do you think about balancing in, in these situations, the need for urgency from a planetary perspective versus the need for certainty from a risk perspective?

A People think about this commonly as an either or kind of thing. We either dawdle incessantly and never do anything as we study stuff, or we barrel forward with zero precautions and cause great harm, right? That mental framework is nuts. That has never been really the way that we do things. What we recommend in our report, and we think is the way it's happening anyways, because again, the horse has left the stable, like people are doing this at big commercial scale already, right? Is Since we are going to be building ammonia ships, moving them, moving ammonia around the world, making ammonia set ports, like, start by monitoring the hell out of that stuff. Gather some data, right? So that if we need to update standards and regulations, we can, and we do it on a scientifically factual basis. I do want to say one other thing here. There are not going to be huge amounts of ammonia pipelines going around the world. Like, we're not going to see that. The way that we use ammonia pipelines in the U.S. today is sort of very unusual and bespoke for our purpose, but that's not the way that we're going to move ammonia around the world Or around countries, or around Europe. Like, it's just not. We're gonna do it with ships.

AI assessment note: “start by monitoring the hell out of that stuff. Gather some data”

Q class six wells, as they're called in the United States, that are starting to, to pop up. Where are we in the trajectory of getting this stuff permanent, of actually doing injections? You know, everybody will tell you there is more than enough geology to support that much sequestration. But of course, to get there is going to require a big mobilization, a lot of regulatory support, and so on.

A Yes. So again, I remind your listeners, this is not Digging trenches and dumping CO₂ in a hole. Like, that is not what we're doing. Uh, we are injecting CO₂ miles underground. Typically more than a mile. One and a half to two kilometers is the typical injection point. And when you do that, you're not injecting a gas. You're actually injecting something that's a lot more like a liquid. It has the density of oil. It has the viscosity of oil. And so places where oil and gas is produced are good places to do it. And We have something like 10 to 20 trillion tons of storage capacity in those kinds of rocks. In order to do that, though, you have to permit these wells, and the regulations are pretty serious. These, these are well-regulated, uh, undertakings in developed countries, in the OECD, in North America, in Europe, and there's an extensive permitting process and rubric you go through. I'm pleased to say the United States has done a couple of things right. Number one, they've hired a bunch of regulators. We now have people to process these things. Three years ago, we didn't.

AI assessment note: “We now have people to process these things. Three years ago, we didn't.”

Q I think points to first is, is the safety question. And, you know, as you said, all fuels are dangerous, but ammonia in particular, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, ammonia in particular is, is very toxic and very corrosive. Now, how big a challenge is it to build out all this ammonia infrastructure? Uh, what does it take that is different, for example, from, uh, natural gas infrastructure?

A Right. So a couple of things that I would say up front. First of all, uh, It is reasonable to be bullish on ammonia for all these applications. It is also reasonable to be skeptical. Like, it, it is not a clear winner in a lot of these markets because of cost, because of the things we're about to talk about, environmental risks and so forth. So Even though I think there will be a big role for ammonia, it may not be a huge role. It may be an essential and important role, but it may not be like a globally dominant one. So I do think you need to caution your listeners in terms of like how, like think carefully and well about how this will actually happen. So let's talk about environmental questions. It is true that ammonia has high toxicity, and because of that, You know, you have to be real careful with it. This is why, like, we have labeling on the ammonia under your sink. It's toxic. Um, it is also true that Drano is toxic, and we keep that under our sink, too. Um, ammonia is, uh, volatile because it vaporizes at room temperature, and that's something that you need to keep an eye on. We wrote a whole chapter on this in our report, and I, I give a shout out to, uh, Corinne Scone, Who, like, wrote that chapter at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Like, because it is so sharp and smelly, like, a very, very, very small amount of ammonia in the atmosphere is something everybody notices. So lon…

AI assessment note: “It is true that ammonia has high toxicity, and because of that, You know, you have to be real careful”