Transforming CO2 into Clean Energy: Spotlight on ReCarbon

hey Michael and Welcome to our Spotlight series thanks Dunya fantastic to be here so can you introduce us to ReCarbon and its technology I'm Michael schmidtz I'm Executive Vice President of product and Partnerships at ReCarbon ReCarbon is a transformative climate technology company we have a technology that can take greenhouse gases particularly methane and carbon dioxide transform those gases into clean fuels and products we essentially take the bonds break the bonds and make those chemicals and products into fuels you can use for everything you can imagine Maritime Aviation for long-term storage the way we do it is using a microwave floating plasma reactor plasma is something that everyone uh is familiar with but very few people really truly understand plasma is the fourth state of matter it's what the sun is made up all the stars in the universe 97% of matter is in a plasma state on Earth you see it with lightning you see it in other phenomena up until this point uh very few uh efforts have been made successfully to control plasma our technology controls plasma takes its extremely powerful State and allows for the disassociation in our case in the creation of clean fuels what the the technology offers is a way to frankly nothing short of revolutionary dramatically reduce the amount of power required to create clean fuels and clean products uh while also dramatically reducing the carbon intensity of the process we deliver on both cost and on carbon intensity and that's really the the True Value we for all industries that require fuels we can offer clean fuels ones that deliver on the ability to move products to move people uh without contributing to climate change and as far as I know you have partnered with local governments right so can you tell me more about that partnership and how that partnership benefits the community fundamentally We Believe Climate Technologies including ours will only scale with Partnerships as part of ecosystems that's because we're trying to replace the entire globe's fossil fuel infrastructure this is an infrastructure that has grown since the time when Edison perfected the light bulb at least the implementation when you went from whale blubber to uh be able to create power and electricity without whales and and frankly that's a long and Global difficult history that we've gone through now we're at breakthrough Point uh for us we believe that these technologies will advance only with an ecosystem that involves all parts of society it has to benefit the communities that are right now using fossil energy it has to create jobs it has to be able to help businesses grow and frankly governments need to be able to benefit and we think that case has already been made with solar with wind with a lot of existing um what you're seeing the development of existing electric um Technologies uh we take a fuel's production process and use clean electricity we're 100% electrified as a result of that uh you can have a complete green production process what you can get with that is you have fuels that are produced that deliver on a carbon promise as well as as having a low cost for a local government we think that local governments strategically offer a what's known as a patient Capital if you will essentially local governments can be a partner that are there for the long term because they have strategic interests in delivering Goods for the people of the community they are looking for obviously return on investment they're looking for the best price but they're also looking for the value when it comes to clean air clean water and and uh lower climate emissions so in that way there it's actually a very strategic way for Climate Technologies to be able to scale in particular one thing that I would emphasize um and many of your folks know this already that Climate Technologies especially hard tech are very Capital intensive like all all technologies that are not software fundamentally to be able to do that you need investment and you need a lot of investment the challenge is that uh you need it over a period of time on projects that require frankly more than a government can give uh at one point but also often more than uh an in a private uh investor is willing to put into a particular project until you've shown it can work and that's what people call a firstof aind project first of aind projects are just a way of saying new technologies that do the things that have been done up to date uh the problem with first of kind Technologies is not that the Technologies with the Technologies just that they're new so one of the things that if you can show through working with a local partner a government that makes you go through all the hoops and makes you prove your technology but then you can deliver for that community in our case we're going to be delivering in one instance clean hydrogen to a local government and a community in Northern LA County if you can do that show it works deliver on good clean energy for that Community you can help make people's lives better and you can help that local government both uh get return on investment if you will but also reduce the price of energy for their residents so from a local government's perspective it's a Strategic investment if they find technologies that are cheaper and cleaner than what they're using right now that's why we think strategically public private Partnerships are the way to scale up large Capital intensive projects that most climate Tech is and how does ReCarbon Tech supports the creation of clean fuels and can this project be replicated elsewhere so specifically absolutely can be replicated elsewhere in fact our technolog is designed to be scalable and modular and what we start with is a literally a twot emission blade which which is our fundamental technology where our reactor is that's where all the gases flow through at a very high rate they're converted within milliseconds into a clean carbon negative sin gas the sin gas then can be converted with off-the-shelf Technologies to a number of really highly valuable and important uh fuels like clean hydrogen like green methanol and like sustainable aviation fuel couple of those fuels are really coming into Focus right now um green methanol actually the growth of green methanol is just ramping up but is growing exponentially and that's largely right now because of the demand for uh green methanol for a large shipping companies uh they're looking at how to reduce their carbon footprint the EU has new requirements that effectively uh act as a tax a carbon tax on shippers uh and there are some of the the world's largest shipping companies are looking for replacement for Bunker fuels they're turning and looking at Green methanol in the same way our process which can lead to sustainable aviation fuel meets an obvious and critical need of the aviation industry where they have to dramatically reduce their footprint but there are no easy solutions short of drop in fuels that are dramatically less carbon intensive that sustainable Aviation fuels comes from a number of different processes but that's the fundamental the demand and the reason for saf being so valuable our process and the reason we think in addition to the fact that we're we can go from small to as large as you need is because we can also be distributed we can be wherever there's a source of Bio gas or frankly if you can take industrial off-stream gas from a power plant a steel mill and be able to use that in a methane source to create the these clean fuels if you go to a wastewater treatment plant a land fill any source of biog gas which there are wherever we have human civilization you can take that gas right now which is often either just vented or flared you can take that gas and create clean fuels with our technology directly and what that means is a small town in Iowa a large city in Argentina a a village in subsaharan Africa all these places can be able to take their biogas and convert them to clean fuels which can be used in hydrogen's case you can use that to power the long-term duration storage to be able to use as electricity Source you can use it for vehicles and you can use it there's a a slew of opportuni to be able to use clean hydrogen there also products that we can make we can help decarbonize a slew of different products uh that right now for instance chemical companies and steel moles are using dirty processes and coming out with high carbon intensity products our production process can decarbonize those as well great and for for our audience who wants to research more about what you're doing where can they find you easiest way is reach out to us through our website ReCarbon in.com please do reach out we're based in Fremont California we have uh four projects that we're working on right now demonstration projects to be able to both deliver those fuels and we're looking at clean hydrogen we're looking at uh green methanol and we're in conversations about sustainable aviation fuel the bottom line is we want to be able to show people out there in the world we've already run this at several different locations one in Korea one in Tennessee we've run at landfills we've gone for 2,000 straight hours with our technology just producing with no hitches no hiccups rather boring it's so stable which is proof of how it's going to work with all these different uh deployments so reach out to us to our website we'd love to talk anytime and we love the opportunity to be able to share this it's an educational process we know if you have something new we know our stuff is is transformative first have to introduce yourself you have to show it works and then it's going to be Off to the Races we're very excited thank you Michael this has been great thank you thank you for watching New Perspective Spotlight series if you like our content please consider subscribing to our social media channel and follow our podcast on your 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