YouSaid · the spoken record

Cody Finke

lines on the record: 35
first: 2023-11-16
most recent: 2023-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We will need to develop the rapidly developing world as well as transition to making new ways to make energy and everything else that's required for the green transition, which all of that takes cement. So at a billion dollars per plant and 5,000 plants, that's ultimately $5 trillion. So it's quite a bit. But fundamentally, we'll make money. So that's an attractive investment solution. So once we can demonstrate that technology works and get down the cost curve by getting to scale, I don't think that financing will be an issue. I think that the challenging part is raising money for the early plants. But luckily we live in a world where there are lots of people that are thinking about those problems. And so I think that the future is actually quite bright.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we want to see Brimstone's technology deployed to produce the world cement. So let's say a cement plant, a modern cement plant costs around a billion dollars. And there are 3,000 of them today. And there probably will be 5,000 by the end of the century”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Just like it's taking money and time to transform a coal and natural gas-based electricity generation system into a renewable one, it'll be the same for the cement industry. I don't think there's a silver bullet in anything. There's going to be some. Massive regulation at the global scale, which I think also is hard to imagine.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And potentially joint venturing with existing companies or building your own plants or licensing and were not more expensive, right? We're cost parity or better than the solution is obvious. Does a company want to buy something that's the same cost or lower that is also better for the environment? The answer is it's obviously yes”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a pretty complex market where normally a real estate developer will put out a request for proposal for a building and then someone will answer that request for proposal, typically an architecture firm or an engineering firm or both and they will designate a builder or a general contractor and a general contractor will then buy concrete from a concrete company and in order to make the concrete that concrete company buys cement from a cement company and usually the cement company and concrete company are the same parent company. So the only companies that ever buy cement are concrete companies, which are typically owned by cement companies. But the folks that ultimately pay for it are like two or three steps down the value chain. They're the real estate developers. So we see as our early customers like real estate developers that are highly motivated to decarbonize because the first plants, the cement is quite likely to be higher cost than conventionally produced cement. So you need some environmental motivation. Later, once we're at scale,”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, yeah. So next five years, what we'll be working on is scaling up the process, right? So the next step is building a pilot plant, and that pilot plant we're being very careful to build it so it actually represents a plant that would be lower cost at scale. And then from there, we will work on building our first commercial plant. A commercial cement plant that's been built 3,000 times before it takes two or three years to build. in the next five years we will be working on building a first commercial plant i think it's probably unlikely that it's you know fully operational”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we are trying to understand the right way to work with these companies. We've had many, many conversations with them. And basically, we kind of decided that the right time to work together is when we have a process working at scale. If we were to work together earlier, then we would potentially jeopardize our intellectual property, which is the only thing that basically how brimstone maintains its investability is by keeping its intellectual property secure. But once we have the process at scale and we're at cost parity or better, then we're basically eager to join venture or license to these existing cement companies so that we can get the process out into the world as fast as possible and decarbonize cement as much as possible and as fast as possible.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And there are no other major sources of calcium besides the silicate rocks. So the other two, right, are limestone and gypsum. Those produce CO2 or sulfuric acid as byproducts. So this is the beauty of our product.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the process is patented and the utilization of this rock to produce Portland cement is also patented. So another company would need to license or joint venture with us in order to make cement via this process.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so just this last July, we got a third party certification that we, the cement that we made past the existing standard for ordinary pool. And cement showing that it's chemically and physically identical to the conventionally produced product. So we have now developed the process that is the third ever process to make ordinary Portland cement. And now we're working on scaling up to pilot scale version of that process that is optimized such that we are confident it will be lower cost at scale.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the idea is to develop the processes to make the building materials of the future in a more economically appropriate and most importantly to us zero carbon way. And cement is the material that we are starting with because it's the most obvious output of our process. But ultimately our process actually produces aluminum and iron. So we hope to really decarbonize all of the major emissions producing building materials in a more efficient way.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And magnesium carbonate is baby powder. So we basically make synthetic baby powder passively that removes CO2.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there's a lot of things you could do with it. Basically, the simplest thing to do with it is just put it in our tailings pile and then backfill our query with it at end of life.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there could be emissions in the process if you use a dirty fuel for producing the heat, right? Heat can be produced via clean electricity or fossil fuel or anything else. But the beauty of our process is that it actually can be substantially lower carbon or even carbon negative under a wide range of energy sources, including the use of those dirtier fuels. And the reason that is because the calcium silicate rock A does not contain any CO2. So we eliminate 60% of the emissions just by using a different rock. And then B, it produces a magnesium-based waste product. And that magnesium-based waste product will passively sequester CO2, just sitting on the ground, it will react with CO2 in the air to permanently sequester CO2.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is Portland Cement. So that's the key thing, right? We don't think global adoption will happen if it's not Portland cement. Or at least won't happen quickly.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The modern economy, we think that we'll be lower cost at scale. And that's core to our philosophy because we don't think that the technology will scale globally if it's not lower cost. And if it doesn't scale globally, it doesn't have a big impact. And if it doesn't have a big impact, then I'm not interested.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the thing that we have to realize is that the production of Portland cement has been around for at least 150 years. And the reality is the production of commodity chemicals, the production method, tends to change every 50 or 100 years. It takes a long time. The global economy really has to change in order to make a new system more economical. For over a century, limestone was the most economical way to make cement. But there's been some massive structural changes in the economy that have made a pretty recent phenomena that we no longer think limestone is the most economical way to make cement. The current production of cement decks relies on the production of electricity and steel from coal. And both of those industries' growth have slowed. And that is leading to a domino effect where the price of cement has been rising. So why was cement made from limestone? Because it's the cheapest way, or it was. The economy has now changed over the last 150 years. And we believe that it's no longer the cheapest way.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gypsum, which cement has been made out of in the past. And then there's calcium silicate, which no one had ever made cement out of.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because both structural failures and construction delays are way more expensive than the cement. They're like 10 to 100 times more expensive. And because of those things, we basically found that no one that we talk to was excited about using a novel material. It seemed just too structurally hard. And that was actually the big aha moment, which really simplified the problem. We realized that, okay, if we want rapid adoption, which is important for climate, right? We want to solve the problem quickly, then you need to produce ordinary Portland cement. So we said, okay, great. Where's all the calcium in the world? And we found that the calcium was in three places. There's limestone, which cement is made out of today.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah. And the reason for that was basically it's just risk. If you're a structural engineer or a builder or a concrete provider, then you want your material insured in case there's a problem with it. And you also don't want construction delays. So you want to make sure that everyone who's building the building knows how to work with the material.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, or maybe even use some different components. Maybe we could just make a different material that still works like Portland cement, but is not Portland cement. And one of my early mentors was one of the women at Caltech who was leading the entrepreneurship program. Her name is Stephanie Anchinski. And she was like, well, you should go talk to customers. And we learned that it would be very hard to enter the market with a novel cement.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We looked around at the existing solutions and we saw that most folks were working on making a novel material, not Portland cement, which makes a lot of sense because if you make a novel material, then you don't have to use limestone and therefore you don't have to make the CO2.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's quite interesting. It had all the attributes, right? It was the giant problem. Basically, nobody was working on it. And it was seemed tractable to me because it was a chemistry problem. The chemistry problem was most of the CO2 emissions have nothing to do with energy. They have to do with the chemistry of making cement. So can I change the chemistry such that it doesn't make CO2 emissions?”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah, it's just another way that humans are perturbing the global carbon cycle in a normal environmental carbon cycle. CO2 would be released from volcanoes and would react with calcium that's been dissolved in the ocean and precipitate limestone. And then that limestone would sit around forever, work for several billion years until it was subducted down to the Earth's crust again and then decomposed under the Earth and the CO2 was released. A volcano. And humans have, by digging up limestone and heating it up to volcano type temperatures, we release that CO2 prematurely, which perturbs the carbon cycle, just like with fossil fuels.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And the majority of the CO2 emissions from cement come from that chemistry for releasing the CO2 from the rock.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And in order to get the calcium out of the limestone, you use all that heat to do a chemical transformation which removes the CO2 from the limestone. And if you use heat, all that CO2 will go up into the atmosphere and you'll be left with the calcium that you can then turn into Portland cement.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So that's where the majority of the missions come from. So, in order to make cement, you need a source of calcium. And the current way we make cement, that source of calcium is limestone.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the emissions associated with cement production come from two places. The first is you need to burn a lot of fuel because you need to use a lot of energy to make cement. And that's about 40% of the emissions in cement production.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I actually really liked that because it made the solution space really simple. And I think you need to simplify the solution space in order for a human brain to be able to think about it creatively. So yeah, that was one of the things that attracted to me, how simple the solution space was.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just about the same. Yeah. And just to clarify the cemented concrete, concrete is the building material. And cement is the binder, the glue. And about 90% of the emissions come from cement.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. The intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC. And this graph kind of broke down emissions by sector. What really attracted me were the chemistry problems because I have a chemist. And there are several categories that have these things called process emissions where the chemical reaction we use to make the thing actually emits a greenhouse gas. It's not just energy. It's the chemical reaction. The four big ones are production of steel, production of aluminum, production of hydrogen actually, and then production of cement. This is a huge problem. I then looked at the amount of funding. And one metric that was really interesting to me was the dollars invested in decarbonizing the product per ton of greenhouse gas emissions. And I couldn't really find anything lower than cement.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so after this solar powered toilet situation, I was looking around for what else to do. And a lot of folks at Caltech were working on splitting water in order to replace fossil fuels. And the idea was we could use clean renewable electricity, split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then use that hydrogen as a fuel to fuel everything we do today, and we wouldn't have to use any fossil fuels. And the scale of that solution was really compelling to me that 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. But I realized that the technology had been around for over 100 years, and we don't make hydrogen by splitting water today. We make hydrogen a different way from a fossil fuel, actually. And we do that because it's the lowest cost way to make hydrogen. And I didn't see a route for hydrogen production to become lower cost than the production from fossil fuels. And therefore, ultimately I didn't.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I spent a long time in India sort of wallowing around in human wastewater as I was working on that project. And yeah, it worked”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and if it's not a sustainable business, then it's also not going to have the environmental impact I want it to have because there just isn't going to achieve the scale.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to work on problems that were massively underworked on, had environmental and social implications and wastewater treatment for applications in low-income countries was an obvious choice. And that was something that one of the labs at Caltech was working on. So I enthusiastically joined that lab. I don't travel in India and seen that firsthand and how it impacted people. And the idea was we'd build a system that didn't need a sewer. didn't need a grid was just fully independent and treated wastewater on site. But through that project, I also learned that deploying these sort of do good technologies is not trivial because people don't just buy them and install them out of the goodness of their heart or at least not enough. There needs to be a compelling economic case. And after three or four years of working on that solar powered toilet system, I realized that there just wasn't.”
2023-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Literally unearthing a climate solution with Cody Finke of Brimstone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT