YouSaid · the spoken record

Jan Wurzbacher

lines on the record: 40
first: 2023-03-30
most recent: 2023-03-30
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

“Between us and achieving that, there are just humans in between. Technology and physics can do it. It's very easy. You can show it. Just have to do it”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes it does feel like a sprint indeed. That's right. But yeah, you know, on the other hand, don't forget that people typically underestimate what technology scale-ups can do. I always say like, well, there are many solutions how we can approach this challenge. But if we look at where humans are really good and is massively scaling up technology. So if we can make it developing and implementing and scaling good technology, we can be fast. We can be fast. There's a saying, I think Bill Gates said that once you typically overestimate what you can achieve in one year, but you typically underestimate what you can achieve in 10 years. And that's a bit the philosophy we are following. And that's how we're racing.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, we've been doing this for almost 13 years now, and I think Christophe and I have. You shouldn't think of kilometer 40 when you're at kilometer 5, but you should rather make sure that you save your forces for the next five and the next five and the next five kilometers. That's a bit what it is. And look at where we're coming from. We started with capturing milligrams of CO2 from the era when our laboratory reactors kind of went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms, from kilograms to tons, from tons to thousand tons. So we did quite a few scale-up steps already. So there are a few left. Of course, those are the largest ones then, but we need something to do for the next 10 to 15 years, right?”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's definitely the case. As you said it in the very beginning, we do have to be a profitable business in order to become climate relevant. There's no other way. And so it's not charity what we're doing. We have to become a business. That's the only way how we can change the wealth for better.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a relatively small amount. So, like those pioneering customers on the private and on the corporate side, they are really enabling us to do the next scale up step and to get to the next level. Once we are there, we need more than that. That is clear. But it's really what they are getting out of it is being a pioneer and enabling a new industry, which I think is a pretty cool thing.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, we also have to think what we need during this first phase, during this decade we're currently living in. So what they get out of it is, well, for themselves, they have taken care of their carbon balance, but they have also enabled a new industry. And that is, I think, what is most intriguing. I'm fully with you. Like 95% of the population would likely only do this when they are forced to it. And that's eventually to get to billions of tons of CO2 removal. We need regulation. We need corresponding legislation. We need governmental procurement programs that might be CO2 taxes or CO2 burdens or incentives that we need for the masses, right? And for really removing billions of tons of CO2 from the air. But that's not what we need now. Like for the next 10 years, Climbworks and the other companies around us, this whole industry, they need like a couple of billion or let's say 10 or 20 of billions.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's increasing, and that's really, for us, that's a good thing. The fact that so many individuals are into that then drives also more corporate actions.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in particular, achieved with a technology that is really bulletproof, such as we are providing that, that has hard economic benefits on their business model. And then we spoke about corporates a lot. Important is that we are also serving just private individuals. So when we started this actually in 2016-17, like a lot of people asked us, hey, like it's cool what you're doing at ClimWorks. You're taking CO2 out of the air. What can we do to help? And that's then when we decided after being an engineering company, a hardware company for many years, which we still are, for the first time, we introduced the digital business model and we opened a webshop, which is active today. So everyone like you and I, we could go to climorks.com and have our personal subscription to remove a certain amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every month with our plans. And that's been quite successful. So we've had since beginning over 14,000 customers.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, not yet, first of all, so they are all anticipating that things will come up and they are already showing up on the horizon. But on top of that, it can be a very vital element of their business for a simple fact because their customers and their stakeholders might just ask them to do it. So those companies who are currently our customers, they know that they, if they can provide CO2 neutral or CO2 negative products to their customers.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those companies, who are our customers, are typically the ones who have had a very sophisticated look at the market and looked at what is available. And like Microsoft has done a great deal of work there and they employed a bunch of scientists to look at the different ways and they turn out with the understanding that what we are doing at Climorx is really what they believe is ultimately scalable. And that's why they are using our service. As you said, they pay us to remove a certain amount of tonnage of CO2 from the atmosphere and then put it underground for them in a really, really long-term permanent way, right? So it's fully additional. So it's not some certificates from some project that might have happened anyway. So it's additional. It's permanent and it's safe. And those are the attributes that are so important to them.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very similar, so it's really the pioneering ones among the large corporates who have come up with very ambitious, like either net zero or even net negative goals of becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's both for us. It's exactly to prove the concept. Of course, we learn a lot from that. Like, based on that, we are now building a 10 times larger plant. We take, of course, all the learnings. But at the same time, it's also the first commercial plant. So we are providing CO2 removal services with that plan to our corporate and private customers as well.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One has eight containers, so that ends up then with a total nominal capacity of 4,000 tons of CO2 per year that can be captured.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So that's really Island is the sweet spot of starting. To power our plant, and we do have the developed storage sites and storage reservoirs where we can inject the CO2 underground where it is then wineralized. It's really those two factors.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The good thing is since we're doing direct air capture, we are very flexible in terms of location. So air is everywhere. So we have our CO2 source everywhere. We are really looking to where is the best place to source sufficient renewable energy. And then the second question is where can we store the CO2? Fortunately, there are many, many regions around the world where you can do safe and permanent CO2 storage in saline aquifers, in basalt rock, as we do it in Iceland, which is the best way to do it because the CO2 is just mineralized and turned into stone. So that's a great way to do it. But there are many other ways. So we are basically what we're doing is mapping the world for renewable energy potential and storage potential and where the two intersect. Those are the sweet spots for large-scale deployment of direct air capture.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally right. It's at the same time an energy challenge. The good news is there is way enough energy arriving on this planet every minute from the sun in terms of solar energy, wind energy. So in terms of availability of renewable energy capacity, that's not an issue at all. But it's like when you think of building up this infrastructure, you really need to do both. So you need to build the direct air capture plans and at the same time you need to build our renewable energy producing capacity, which on the other hand, however, can also be a good thing if you build direct air capture plans, let's say, in regions where there is not a good electricity supply, no good electricity grids. There can be good synergies, right? You can support local communities by the same solar PV fields and wind farms that are built up to deploy direct air capture. But you need to do both.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Soon as possible, that's right. In terms of the area that we need to cover, it's not that bad. If you think of all the area that is covered for open pit mining of lignin or coal, that's even much worse. So, I mean, energy infrastructure is large in any case. So that infrastructure will also be large, but not larger than other infrastructure. So in terms of speed of scaling, in terms of required financing, in terms of required area and in terms of Industry output of the world. Those are all numbers where you can show it's feasible to scale up. But it's big. It's a big job we have to do. It's a certain portion of the global economy output that needs to go in there. But it's just like in the end, like, you know what we are talking is the creation of a new industry of the size of today's oil and gas industry. That's basically it.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you would need something like 750,000 containers for that, which is that a large number? It's actually not a large number. It's actually what goes through Shanghai port in two weeks, right? It's not a lot compared to global economy. And that's 1%, and then you can tenfold it, then you have 10%, and then you're nearly there.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of size, maybe let me give you one example just that you have something to imagine in terms of What does it mean in terms of equipment that you need to put around Earth? Our plans are built out of modular systems. We call them CO2 collectors. And in one CO2 collector has the form of a 44 chipping container. So how many containers would you need to take 1% out of global emissions? So the climate science tells us by mid of this century, we need to take 10, 20 percent out of the emissions out of the air. So let's take 1% of that.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Billions of tons per year scale by mid of the century, so by 2050. And that's where we need to go. So other industries have shown that you can do that. It's not impossible. And also in terms of”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, right now as we speak, Climbergs, we have the largest operating plant running. That's our Orca plant in Iceland. We're speaking of thousands of tons per year. So it's a small scale. So we need to thousandfold that to get to millions of tons. And like this industry is set up to scaling up to the million tons per year scale in the next couple of years towards the end of this decade. So that's what will happen. We are doing that like a handful of other companies are working towards that. So that's happening. Then the next question is how can we scale up from millions of tons to billions of tons? If you look at what other industries have done, again, referring to solar PV or the wind industry, they did something like 10x every 10 years if we can do the same. Maybe we can do twice as fast as them. Then it is feasible that we can scale to the”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's right. I mean, for us as a company, that's a large amount. That's much more funding than we had available before the previous financing round that was at around $100 million. But if you look at it from the other side, if you look at what this world needs to invest into corresponding infrastructure, into such types of technology, that's still a tiny sum, right? We need to invest, as you said, we need to invest billions, tens of billions and hundreds of billions. And that's what we see on the horizon now. So governments start understanding what is needed. There are programs like the Department of Energy is starting to promote those type of technologies. They are creating funding programs to increase the speed of scaling. Think of it as the very, very early phases of the solar PV and wind industries where you had the first prototypes out there. And they're also massive programs helped scaling that up. And that was a great success.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It's capital intensive. We are building hardware. We're putting tons of concrete on steel in the ground to start capturing CO2. And while that's why we have just closed our financing round number six in the history of the company just in April 2022.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by that temperature increase, the CO2 is released again from the surface of the filter material. And you can turn on a pump that is then sucking out basically the pure concentrated CO2 from the filters. You can then hand it over to injection. That's what we do in Iceland with our partners from Carpfix. They have developed this method where they inject the CO2 in underground porous rocks where the CO2 is mineralizing with the rocks. So within two years, the CO2 is just turned into stone there. And then on the other hand, our filter will just start again from the beginning. So we'll cool it down, expose it to the next portion of airflow, we'll capture more CO2, and then this can go on for years after like a couple of years, you have to replace the filter then.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this filter material is similar like a sponge, it has a high surface area, it is very porous, and it just reacts with CO2 when CO2 molecules pass by. So we have this filter inside the containers. And then in the first step of our filtering process, we just turn on the fans that are at the side of the filter box. We pull air through the filter. That takes about one to two hours after which the material is full. It's etc. Then we close the lids of these filter boxes. We heat them up to around 100 degrees Celsius. That's 200 something Fahrenheit. It's like boiling water temperature. We don't need high temperature. We don't need fancy stuff to do it. Just like heat it up a little bit. You can even do that with solar heat.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So start with the first part, a Climorx Direct Air Capture plant. So we have our modular containers that we call CO2 collectors, and they contain a filter material. You can imagine that as a as kind of a sponge, like a sponge lacks water and would suck up water.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Well, and just keep in mind, like when you drink your Coke, right, the CO2 comes out again. So it's not a permanent storage of the CO2. So those first plants, they were not meant to reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. It was just an initial market That we were tapping into to scale our technology.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. In terms of climate effects, that market is totally irrelevant. Is that a market? Could you grow a sustainable business on that? Yes, sure. So we could have decided just to become a small, medium-sized company developing direct air capture plans and building them around the world to supply beverage factories. That could have been an option, but that was not what we were interested in.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is taking it. That's still an operation that is taking CO2 out of the air to then sell the CO2 to a greenhouse. They are fertilizing their plants with CO2 and also to Coca-Cola who are making sparkling drinks with it.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, definitely that was a big challenge, in particular given the fact that when we started 2009, 2010, 11, what we were proposing was not generally accepted. People were even fighting us. There were professors writing articles saying you should not invest in direct air capture because it's a waste of resources. We should focus on getting our coal power plants off the grid, just to give an example. The world was probably not ready to accept that it was too late just to stop burning coal. And that is something that has fundamentally changed over the past, say, five years or so. But when we started, we weren't there yet. So you said, how did we start? We started actually looking for niche applications. So we did something totally different. Our first plant, we built here in Switzerland.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you build machines like we are doing, you can do it on much, much less area. So you are about a thousand times more area efficient. So at the same area where you can take one ton out of the air with trees, you could take 1,000 tons out of the air with machinery. So that's important. You need substantially less area. You need energy. So you need, for example, solar or wind or geothermal like you would want to use typically renewable energy. So that's the thing. So you can scale technology based solutions for direct air capture to a scale of 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air. That's possible. So we'll probably, it'll not be one technology. It'll be one solution. We need a lot of things to do it, but technological or scaling up such direct air capture and similar solutions will have to carry a major part of these 10 billion tons otherwise.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very likely if we look what's happening on the world markets. So typically the area we have at our disposal for planting anything, we need it rather for food production. So that's then where technical solutions come in, such as Climorx, as we are doing.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, they have some issues attached to them. So, first of all, it's good we should plan as many trees as possible. And by the way, we should avoid burning down trees and deforesting trees in the first place and then plant more and let's not say but and trees need a lot of area and they are not necessarily there forever. They might burn down, the land might degrade, they might not be growing for the next thousands of years. So that's CO2 that is stored in trees is not necessarily bound for thousands of years. And very simply speaking, if we just do the calculation, what about capturing these 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air just by planting trees or doing similar biological methods, then you'll end up with huge areas that you need to fill with new trees. It's like you need something like the area of whole Europe or twice the area of India. And that's very likely not feasible. I mean, right now we are entering a food crisis.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A big portfolio of things to do. So you asked what that means? Does that mean we have like huge giant turbines all over the world? Well, there are a few things we can do. We can, very simply speaking, plant trees. They take CO2 out of the air.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, you're making exactly the right point, guys. You said it, you said it additionally. And that's a very important point. Like when we started Climorx, many people asked us, hey, is that really what we need to do today? So why are you bothering capturing CO2 out of the air while there are still so many coal power plants and so many cars and planes driving and flying around and producing CO2? Should we not stop first all of these? And the answer to that is we could have asked that question maybe two, three decades ago, then this would still have been possible, but it's just too late. It's too late to ask that question. So the only chance of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement is being bold on both ends. From switching to renewables, but then to address these 10 billion tons of CO2 that need to be removed, we don't have”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your numbers like doing back of the envelope calculations, estimations, what can we do? What cannot we do? I can give you an example, like to take a ton of CO2 out of ambient air, you need to filter around 2 million cubic meters of air. Wow, one out of 2500 molecules in the air is CO2. Only one out of 2500. So imagine you walk on the broadway or whatever, and imagine you need to pass 2500 people until you find one person that you're looking for. And then you continue walking, you need to pass another 2,500 people until you find one person. So that's literally what ACU2 capture system does. So you need to filter a lot of air to take a significant tonnage of CO2 out of the air.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Concentrated sun alignment into something valuable. And he, like a couple of years before we started, he had this idea and he said, hey, if we want to do that at large scale, we need a closed cycle. So we need to take CO2 out of the air. We can then combine it with sunlight and water and make, say, renewable jet fuel out of that. Then the jet fuel is burned. The CO2 is emitted again to the atmosphere. And then you have to recapture it from the air. So you have to like turn it around in a cycle. That's what can be then really long term sustainable. And then so there was this idea. There was a project on that, totally different technology. And when we started, it was kind of the job of coming up with a different technology, which is more efficient, which is more scalable. So really when we started, it was like, I remember the first days after we had incorporated ClimWorks, like the first thing I did is really sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and writing down.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was not us who had this idea for the first time. There was actually a project at the Swiss Institute of Technology. It was a project at the professorship of renewable energy carriers by Professor Steinfeld. And he is a researcher who's been working for the past 20 years or more than that on solar fuels or solar materials. So he developed solar-driven reactors that could produce renewable hydrocarbons. So basically turn”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a good question. Probably we didn't have that many thoughts. It's rather this dream of building up something by your own. I mean, I was always interested in solving hard technical problems. That's maybe one ingredient from my end. On the other hand, when I was in school, I organized parties and I did some stuff here and there. And I always thought like doing something, building up something, that there was always something I was intrigued by. And Christoph pretty much the same. So it was really when we met and we asked each other, hey, what do you want to do one day? We didn't know about direct air capture. Or, of course, we knew about the climate topic and climate change, but it was not at a level of attention where it is today back in those days. So we are really just a stream.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's correct. I actually came to Zurich back in 2003. Personally, I'm originally from Hamburg in Germany, but now almost 19 years ago, moved to Zurich. I wanted to study here at ETH Zurich, the main technical university. And, well, that was thought to be for three years or five years first, but then as it happened, really at the first day when you're introduced to the university, then we were organized in small groups of students to get a tour through the university. And I happened to be in the same group as Christoph was, and the two of us became friends very quickly, really in the first days, and both at the dream of founding a company. And, well, then it happened just six years later.”
2023-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT