YouSaid · the spoken record

Shashank Samala

lines on the record: 34
first: 2024-02-08
most recent: 2024-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, within five years, our big goal is to get to a megaton, right? Increase the size of this plant to a million tons a year. The nice thing about our business is it's very clear what impact you can have, right? It is very much measured in tons of CO2 you remove from the air. both the business goal revenue goal and the impact goals are tightly aligned right because we sell carbon removals we sell carbon credits to the customers so you know we have this goal to get to a billion tons a year in the 2030s and you know that's going to essentially require us to make these facilities incredibly low cost incredibly land efficient and you know copy and paste these million ton per year facilities all across the world”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to be breaking ground in Louisiana, actually next year. So we're actually building multiple facilities in Louisiana. But the one that we're building for the DACU is a few years away, but there's other ones that we are building as well.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's lots of places in the world where we can find low cost renewable energy, where there's a lot of supply, but not a lot of demand from civilization.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next facility is recently we won this directory capture hub award from the Department of Energy, so won about $600 million to build a facility that can scale up to a million tons a year. And that is Southwest Louisiana. So Louisiana is where we are currently have our sites in to scale in the medium term. But we want these facilities all across the world. If you think about where renewable energy is cheap and where there is a lot of land and where you can put CO2 underground, right? Directory capture can pull CO2 anywhere in the world. So we can be very strategic in finding places, finding sites to site these facilities in. And, you know, we love the Rift Valley in Kenya where there's a lot of excess geothermal energy. So we can start building these in the global south. We can build these in India.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's going to be smaller than a golf course, like an 18-hole golf course, or maybe a better way, if you think about a cement facility, it's going to be less than quarter of the size of a cement facility.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's amazing how land efficient that these actually are. So compared to trees, these are actually about Five to ten thousand times more land efficient. So to remove a billion tons, so I talked about a thousand plans, you need a few Disney worlds. And the reason for that is how efficient that they are footprint-wise. So we just built a plant that is about 40 foot tall. And the next slide we're going to build is going to be about 75 feet tall. And then one after that is going to be 130 feet tall. How many square square”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to get to a billion tons a year? That's really our goal here. So the facilities that we're going to build, each facility is going to be around a million tons per year. So we're going to continue to increase the size of the plant, size of the project. So basically we need to increase the scale by about 1,000 X for the size of the plant. And then to reach a billion tons, you need to build a thousand of those, right? So we're talking tremendous scale and growth in the next 10, 15 years.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Per ton tax credit to companies pulling carbon from the air and putting it underground. So that is happening in the US. It's probably the biggest thing that's happened to directory capture. And I think that will likely be a stepping stone to what will come next, which are very large compliance markets.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so just in a short time frame, these markets have gotten very, very, very large. This year we signed a contract with Microsoft. It's about $315,000. It's a multi-100 million dollar deal. And for us, we think that just the voluntary carbon market will be scaling up to hundreds of millions of tons according to BCG between 100 to 200 million tons by the end of the decade. We think that the price is going to coalesce around $300 per ton given where the supply and demand is. But at the same time, the world cannot get to net zero without compliance markets. So a lot of this has to be driven by policy. And we've seen that a bit with the Inflation Reduction Act, which has something called the 45Q. It gives additional 180.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, tell me about how you, you know, when you build out a model, right for the business side, what are you depending on? I mean, obviously you've got these companies in the US who are... But can you rely on that alone as a source of revenue?”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so after the limestone absorbs the carbon from the air, we put it back in the oven to heat it up and pull out the CO2 it captured from the air. And that CO2, it's pure CO2. It's over 99%. And what we do with it is we compress it, we turn it into a liquid. For this facility, we are specifically storing it into concrete. So concrete has this ability to sequester CO2 permanently. So that's why we're doing right now. And starting next year, we're going to be sequestering CO2 underground safely and securely.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's operating now. So the capture capacity is about 1,000 tons a year. It's a modular system. We've deployed about 24 units and next year we're increasing at least by 10x, building another facility.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this is the first director capture facility in North America that captures and stores CO2 from the air. It's small, but what we think it is, it's a blueprint of what we think the carbon immobile at scale looks like. There's lots of things that we learned along the way, right? Actually putting steel in the ground and building projects is very different than building prototypes and experimenting with science in the lab. Obviously, both are important, but that's why we learned this year.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, that's really the magic number, right? And that's really the lens that we've taken from the beginning, where it actually gets it to 100 bucks a ton. At the end of the day, what we are doing is just putting a bunch of rocks and a bunch of trays, right? That's why we think that going for simplicity and scalability, and if you ever want to reach billions of tons, it has to be affordable by society. It cannot be 500 or 700 bucks a ton. It has to be much slower. And I think that's really how you get to make a lot of impact in the world. It has to be incredibly accessible.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at least to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if you have to remove anywhere from $5 to $10 billion of CO2 from the air. So if you think about the overall climate math, right, we emit 50 billion tons a year. And if we can get 80 to 90% of the way through with decarbonization and reduction, you're left with 5 to 10 billion tons that you have to remove from the air. So we think that in a medium to long term, the carbon price is likely going to be in the 100 to 200 per ton mark. And at that cost for $5 to $10 billion, we were talking about a trillion dollars worth of carbon removal industry.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Group that the demand for carbon removals, what they saw is that just from the voluntary carbon markets, there's a massive shortfall in the projected supply of carbonyls in 2030.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in general, if you want to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air, there has to be compliance markets in a very large way, not just in Europe, but also in the US and basically every other country. But in the short term, you're exactly right. There's lots of corporations who either have net zero targets or see compliance targets coming down the pipe and are getting ready to buy removals. So actually just came off from a call with a customer who's a shipping company and they basically told us that to send ships into and out of Europe, they have to buy carbon removals and have to reach a set of emissions targets year by year for the next 10, 20 years. So what we are seeing is that actually I think there's a really good survey that Boston consulted.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, you know, for a company like Microsoft, Fitch has a lot of emissions from things like running data centers, they're buying as much renewable energy and decarbonizing as much as they possibly can. And what they realize is that the last 30, 40% of the emissions, they have to remove from there. And that's why they come to us and they buy carbon removals.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So today our customers are corporations with carbon net zero targets. And soon corporations with compliance requirements to become net zero. So today we have customers like Microsoft and Stripe, Meta, who are buying removals from us to help them reach net zero.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you bake limestone in the kiln, the output, the lime, is super thirsty for CO2. Like it wants to be naturally stable by pulling carbon from the air. So that property is what we take advantage of by taking thin layers of lime and placing them on trays. So imagine very large baking trays, right? And we stack these baking trays vertically to 20, 30, 40, 50 feet. And you effectively have a very tall baking rack with trays with thin layers of lime. And as the air passes through, basically gobbles up that CO2. And in a few days, it turns into calcium carbonate, which is limestone, which is exactly where you started with. So that's how we capture the CO2.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so limestone by itself is a sponge already with water, right? So the first thing that we do effectively is Give it superpowers by first baking it in a kiln, right? So effectively we pull the water out of a sponge and it turns into calcium oxide, which is lime. And lime is very thirsty for CO2. And that is what we effectively expose to the air to pull CO2 from the air.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Limestone is available. It is cheap. We can use this as a sponge. And what we realize is that even that wasn't enough. We need to figure out how to enhance it, how to give it superpowers, how to supercharge it to remove carbon much faster than it naturally would.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, we're still sort of removing carbon from the atmosphere, but sort of not in the most traditional way. So the first hypothesis was if you want to remove billions of tons from CO2 from the air, whatever the sponge you use has to be abundant and very, very cheap and close to free as possible. And in that journey, we found that carbonates, magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate are some of the most abundant materials on the planet that also have something called alkalinity, which is the ability to be very thirsty for CO2, if you will. So we found that limestone specifically is, you know, you can get this stuff for like 30, 40 bucks a ton. There's trillions of tons of limestone across the world. There's 4% of the Earth's crust. And we picked this and we realized that, okay.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you started to look at what you could possibly do, tell me what you landed on. Because the model that you ended up, because you founded this company not very long ago, but the model is not about sucking air from the atmosphere.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I mean, just think about that, even food or rice, like there's in the millions or hundreds of millions. But when you think about doing things at a billion on scale, which we have to remove carbon from the air, like you have to have this mindset of cost and scalability through and through. And that basically, if you have that lens, you end up filtering out most things that you see.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think in general, decarbonization and carbon removal both have to be done in a distributed way all across the world. You will all seem small in any given location, but collectively they will amount to billions of tons. I mean, that's how we emit today CO2. Like if you think about that question, what does society actually make billions of tons of, like in mass? Can you think about a few things?”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So fundamentally, it's an expensive gas separation problem. So the traditional way folks have gone about it was basically to build a novel material artificially. But the problem was not whether you could capture the CO2. The problem was the cost of making that material. And because the supply chains don't exist, you often had to use these exotic hard-defined materials. So if you ever want to pull billions of tons from the air, the infrastructure just wasn't there. It would have been massive and expensive. So we came at it from a different perspective, which was how do we enhance nature? How do we, you know, are there things that we can borrow from nature basically for free to solve the same problem”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. So for me, I didn't have any existing mental model for how to remove carbon from the air. For me, what really matters mattered most was cost and scalability. So I was looking at each one of these approaches from that perspective. So there are many different ways that people were trying to pull carbon from the air, but the CO2 in the air is very dilute. You're pulling one molecule of CO2 out of every 2,500 molecules.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question. So my background coming in was manufacturing and robotics and automation. And this problem set is mostly chemical engineering, process engineering, something that I hadn't done professionally. A lot of it was me relearning high school chemistry and brushing up on fundamental thermodynamics and heat of reaction. Evaluate all these different methods and approaches in a very unbiased way, right? So for me, because I come from manufacturing, which has thin margins and you really have to know where the sense and dimes go, always evaluating each of these approaches through a robust cost model that I built from the ground up. So yeah, it was fun just really learning a lot of the science.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. You know, when you think about the overall decarbonization formula, right, you have to decarbonize every single part of the economy. You have to decarbonize electricity by going from fossil fuels to solar and wind and hydro and so forth. You have to decarbonize agriculture, shipping, aviation, steel, concrete, et cetera. And in this formula, there is a few sectors that are hard to abate. So because some of those sectors will be slow to decarbonize, we need to complement them by removing carbon from the air.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. We can just reduce emissions anymore. It won't be enough to stop climate change if we've emitted too much. And you can't reduce emissions. You've already emitted. So we have to start removing some of that carbon from the atmosphere. By some, I mean in the tune of billions of tons of CO2 per year.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so really during some of my last years at tempo, I was spending my nights and weekends thinking about specifically climate. I grew up in Southeast India, so a lot of the things I was reading about where the worst impacts of climate are faced by the world's most vulnerable people that resonated with me. And I knew I wanted to work in climate. During that journey, I learned about the importance of carbon removal. So some friends of mine had started this organization called Carbon 180, which is all about finding pathways, both from policy and a technology perspective to make a dent in this carbon mobile problem. So it was really a chance for me to go in and sort of think from 30,000 feet. And I was specifically interested in technology methods. So I spent a lot of time”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Several years into starting the business, I realized that I wanted to work on something that had a much more profound impact on society generally. And I found that I just couldn't wake up in the morning, be motivated and think that I would be doing this for the rest of my life. So that's when I started thinking about, okay, sort of what's next and what are other problems I could help contribute to.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only launched in April of 2020 by the end of this decade, Shishak says Heirloom's technology could start to make a meaningful dent in removing CO2 worldwide. Shashank's background in business began in 2013 when he was just 22 years old. He co-founded an electronics manufacturing company called Tempo Automation, which built circuit boards used in everything from rockets to medical devices to consumer electronics. But even though Tempo had contracts for major clients like NASA, after a while, Shashank found himself wanting to focus on something bigger.”
2024-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT