 Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our briefing about direct air capture. I'm Dan Bresset, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we have also developed a program that provides technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs. And even more recently, we've expanded into beneficial electrification technical assistance, which is very exciting. EESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics and briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts, are always available for free online at www.esi.org. If you'd like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Today, we continue our briefing series, Scaling Up Innovation to Drive Down Emissions. We previously covered green hydrogen on April 27. And next up on June 2, our topic will be building out electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Later in June, we'll have our fourth installment of this series on offshore wind energy to review presentation materials and summary notes. And for RSVP for what comes next, again, check out our resources at www.esi.org. As we explore these big swings, we need to make progress on greenhouse gas emissions reductions. We're also considering how we're learning to live with climate change in our companion briefing series. The polar vortex and sea level rise were our first two sessions, which will be followed by examinations of wildfires on June 13 and extreme heat later next month. You can sign up for the entire suite of briefings at www.esi.org forward slash briefings. Climate change is an enormous problem and one that requires very, very big solutions. We have dug ourselves in a pretty big hole when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. And to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change, we need to deploy every available mitigation strategy at scale and with no time to lose. No need to take my word for it. The clear and compelling scientific findings in the latest reports from the International Panel on Climate Change do that much better than I ever could. The bottom line from the IPCC reports is unfortunately quite stark. We are rapidly running out of time to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. The reports call for immediate and rapid curtailing of emissions. And the reports also state that we will likely need to begin removing emissions from the atmosphere to meet our climate goals. There are many methods for removing carbon from the atmosphere. For example, trees and forests have done this for millions and millions of years. But there are also emerging ways to remove emissions using technology. We have covered several of these methods in past briefings, including our Congressional Climate Camp series from a year ago, as well as the growing green industry and innovation, Mass Timber, who've written on many of these topics as well. And there'll be a lot more to come, especially in the context of the next Farm Bill. But our focus today is direct air capture. Direct air capture, which is a process to chemically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, is exactly the sort of climate change solution that could help us make up for lost time and keep us on track to limit warming to below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 2 degrees Celsius, as required by the Paris Agreement. How does one chemically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? Well, I can say those words, but I am not a chemist. I am not an engineer. And I'm not a magician. So I'm very little help when it actually comes down to doing it. And so thankfully, we have a very great panel of experts to help us understand how that is even possible. And the good news is that it is definitely possible. And with the necessary investments and smart policies in place, actually quite doable. Let me remind everyone that we'll have some time at the end of our session for questions. And we'll do our best to incorporate questions from our audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us two different ways. First, you can send us an email, an email address to use as ask, ASK, at EESI.org. Or even better, follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Engage with us on that social media platform and send it to us that way. But before we turn to our panel, once again, we are joined by a very special guest. Representative Paul Tonko serves New York's 20th Congressional District, which includes the communities of Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga Springs, and Amsterdam. Representative Tonko serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee and shares the subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. He also serves on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and on the Natural Resources Committee. Prior to serving in Congress, Representative Tonko was the president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, also known as NYSERDA. Representative Tonko, thank you for taking time to join us in our briefing today. Thank you, Dan, and EESI for hosting this great briefing and inviting me to offer a few remarks. The folks you will hear from today are world experts in carbon removal. So it is an honor to be part of this event. I will try to keep my remarks brief to give more time to the real experts. But for my part, I have spent my career pushing for science-based solutions to tackle climate change. And since joining Congress in 2009, I have seen firsthand what can happen when the federal government invests in clean energy innovation. We have seen revolutions in batteries, solar, wind, and several other technologies because of the federal government's support for entrepreneurs and innovators. And now we need that same commitment for the next generation of technologies, direct air capture, clean hydrogen, and offshore wind. These are the solutions that are going to help get us over the finish line to a net zero economy. And because they are new emerging industries, federal involvement can ensure that we get them right from the start by requiring projects be developed responsibly with robust community engagement and strong labor and environmental standards. That is the benefit of having the public sector partner with businesses, NGOs, and academics on these cutting edge industries. For carbon removal in particular, I want to stress that even under the best case scenario, we will not be able to reach net zero without major reductions in emissions. But if we do not start to develop the technologies that we will need for that last 10% of decarbonization today, they will not be ready when we really need them in the 2030s and 40s. CDR is also the only way for us to address our historical emissions. And I believe it is our responsibility to invest in removing these emissions to reduce our impact on our global neighbors. Many different removal technologies such as direct air capture are very promising, but they are also new and expensive. They need to scale massively and they need customers that are willing to pay for this service. Private commitments have stepped up amazingly, but in the end, carbon removal will need federal policy intervention to scale to where it needs to be. So I am very excited that DOE is moving forward with developing DAC hubs with funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law and building upon that investment. Congressman Scott Peters and I recently introduced the Federal Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act. This bill was put together with the input from dozens of incredible stakeholders, including Carbon 180 and WRI. The bill requires DOE to pay for the removal of a specific number of tons each year. Over time, the number of tons goes up and the maximum price DOE can pay goes down as a way to continue to drive cost reductions. Under this proposal, DOE is required to follow best practices for monitoring, reporting and verification of removals and prioritize domestic jobs, environmental justice, and innovative technologies. This bill would guarantee demand that can help jumpstart the industry and provide long-term certainty at significant scale. DOE is great at fostering innovation and I truly believe this is just one approach that could be effective. But it is not the only option and I look forward to continued conversations about what is the right role for the federal government in carbon removal? We know the cost of climate inaction is high and carbon management can be an important role in our fight to decarbonize. So I look forward to hearing the perspectives shared by our panelists on how the direct air capture can fit into our climate solutions toolbox. I thank you again, EESI, for organizing this great briefing. It should be an excellent discussion and I'm looking forward to hearing the perspectives and potential solutions that you will all share. Keep up the excellent work and I'm proud to be a partner with this great industry. Well, thank you very much, Representative Tonko. It doesn't get much better than that to help us introduce our panel today. So thanks very much for joining us. Our first panelist is Gianna Amador. She is the co-founder and policy director at Carbon 180, which Representative Tonko just mentioned. She helps drive the policy strategy of her organization which is on the leading edge of reversing 200 years of carbon emissions. And all of her work, Gianna, is focused on connecting economic development, social justice and climate action. And she was named to the 2020 Forbes 30 under 30 list for social impact. Gianna, thank you for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you for your presentation. Thanks so much, Dan. And thanks to EESI for hosting this great briefing. Really excited to learn from the other panelists and get really great questions from the audience. And big thanks to Representative Tonko for his leadership on this work as well. As Dan mentioned, I'm Gianna Amador, co-founder and policy director at Carbon 180. We're an organization that works closely with US policymakers, entrepreneurs and peer organizations to design policies that can bring a whole portfolio of carbon removal solutions to the gigaton scale, both in line with the climate science, but also in line with equity and justice. And we're actually the only team in the US that's exclusively dedicated to fighting climate change by cleaning up our legacy emissions. And so to kick us off with the first slide, I just wanted to do a little bit of level setting around the climate math. I know Dan introduced this topic at the beginning and talked a little bit about the work that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done. But I think we're all here because we know that climate change is a serious problem and we're in search of solutions that can help us chart the way to a livable future. And in particular, there are sort of two core mechanisms that we usually talk about when it comes to climate change, a few tools in our toolkit. So first, we know that, first and foremost, we need to reduce our emissions drastically and rapidly. And we also can adapt to the climate impacts that we're already feeling today. But what we're here today to talk about, which is demonstrated on the next slide, is really this third tool or pillar of climate action that's often overlooked. And so alongside drastic emissions reductions, we also need to clean up carbon from the atmosphere and actually at pretty large scales. So there's sort of a wide range of estimates of what amount of carbon removal we might need up until 2100. But really we're looking at capturing about 10 gigatons of CO2 per year through both land and tech-based carbon removal solutions, which to put that number in perspective is about a quarter of our total global annual emissions today. So this is a pretty significant chunk of the climate problem. It is one that we need to get started on today. So to make sure that when it gets to 2030, 2050, we have solutions that are readily deployable and can really meet that sort of 10 gigaton order of magnitude. The good news on the next slide is that we have a whole portfolio of solutions that can really help us meet there, meet that 10 gigaton target. So on the land sector side, we have solutions including forests, as well as storing carbon in our agricultural soils. We also have some more nascent ocean-based approaches and of course solutions on the technological side, including direct air capture, carbon utilization and enhanced weathering. So we have a sort of whole set of solutions that we can really harness to be able to meet that climate target and excited to dive a little bit more in particular today into direct air capture. On the next slide, I think there's just one more point that I wanted to sort of drive home before we dig into the details of direct air capture. And that is first that carbon removal is not carbon capture. These are two different solutions and sort of different sectors that oftentimes get completed both in general media and in a lot of times NGO circles as well, but they really serve sort of two different purposes in the climate fight. So carbon capture in particular will scrub CO2 from point sources and that can be a localized source of emissions either from something like an electricity generation plant or an industrial facility, let's say cement or seal. And the idea is that this sort of scrubbing or capture lowers the emissions making it either lower emissions or lower carbon or sort of net zero. But carbon removal in particular has the ability to actually capture carbon from the ambient air allowing us to clean up our historic or legacy emissions. And that's not tied to any particular source. It's about cleaning up past emissions that are already in the atmosphere. And compared to carbon capture, which is oftentimes sort of net zero, these are actually solutions that can be net negative. And so there's an important role for both technologies to play, but I think for the purpose of this briefing, important to sort of distinguish between those two technologies. And getting into, yeah, the next slide on direct air capture, really excited to talk a little bit more about engineered solutions. I think we can skip ahead one more slide and just talk about some of the advantages of direct air capture. So this is I think one of the carbon removal solutions where we've seen a ton of progress in just the last couple of years. It garners a lot of attention and support, I think, for a number of really good reasons. It has a few advantages. One, it's one of the most scalable carbon removal solutions and a place where we've seen a lot of private sector investment. Direct air capture also provides very permanent and durable carbon storage and has a relatively low land footprint. So just to walk you guys through on how direct air capture works at a high level, you basically have what sort of look like large fans that are capturing, or excuse me, that are allowing air to flow through them. Through that sort of passing through of air, there'll be a chemical solvent or servant that selectively reacts with the CO2 and binds the CO2. And so at that point, the sort of CO2 depleted air gets released and we use either a source of electricity, heat, or humidity to basically reverse that original capture process, regenerate the solvent or the solvent, and you end up with a pure stream of CO2. From that process, what you do with the CO2 is actually really important. It can be utilized into a number of different products like chemicals, fuels, building materials, or it can be sequestered geologically in dedicated underground storage. So that's just sort of how the technology works at a high level. On the next slide, in addition to its climate benefits, I think there are a number of really exciting opportunities around direct air capture that I wanted to touch on. The first is job creation. This chart is one that the Rodean Group did an analysis on a few years ago, and they estimated that for every megaton direct air capture plant, there's about 3,500 jobs that are created throughout the entire supply chain. So not only is there an opportunity to capture tons through direct air capture for the climate, but it's also an opportunity to create jobs in potentially formerly fossil dependent regions and also drive a lot of community benefits to where these sort of larger projects are cited. One more opportunity that I wanted to mention on the next slide is just opportunities around carbon utilization. So Carbon 180 did a market sizing report a few years ago that estimated that there's a $1 trillion total available market in the United States for products derived from CO2. Again, these are things like plastics, chemicals, building materials, fuels, and that market size actually rises to $6 trillion when you look at those markets globally. So there's a really big opportunity for us to utilize CO2 in industries that are currently relying on fossil fuels. I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit more, but a lot of these products are just carbon neutral because they utilize the CO2 and release them back into the atmosphere and aren't net negative, but it is still an important sort of decarbonization opportunity. So next on the next slide, I wanted to talk a little bit on where we are today. I think we're at a really exciting inflection point for the direct air capture field. On the next slide, I have Carbon 180's direct air capture map that really shows the entire sort of innovation ecosystem that's working on direct air capture from companies to academics to NGOs. And on the next slide, you'll see a sort of hone in on the number of, the dozen commercial and demonstration plants for direct air capture that are happening across the globe. So direct air capture is real. It's happening today. Together, all of these plants are capturing about 10,000 tons of CO2. And so it's, I would say orders of magnitude lower than we need to be for our climate goals, but we have demonstrated the technology at both sort of pilot and commercial scales. And so the sort of next challenge will be reaching much larger thresholds and just wanted to flag that there are companies who are working on this, through the Department of Energy's direct air capture hubs program, but also carbon engineering has a one million ton of CO2 plant planned in West Texas. So this is a resource that will constantly update and one where there are just sort of rapid developments happening in the field as these projects get financed. Next slide, please. I also just wanted to talk quickly about some of the progress that's happening in the private sector. I think because the federal government has invested in a lot of foundational research, we're now starting to see the private sector really ramp up their engagement in this space. So Air Loom, a direct air capture company recently closed. They're sort of seed round funding at $53 million. Climarch just raised $650 million. They're another direct air capture company. And XPRIZE, which is running a carbon removal competition, just announced their sort of 15 finalists and six of those companies were direct air capture. So a lot of investment happening in this space. And I think that's also indicative of this sort of like increasing quality of the startups in this space. It's not just sort of two big incumbent players anymore. We're seeing a lot of new entries into this space with really credible, exciting technology. Next slide. And the last thing that I wanted to mention from the private sector angle is the frontier announcement. This was a market commitment from Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey, where they committed $1 billion over the next nine years to purchase carbon removal. And this was a really exciting announcement because it provides sort of a long-term market signal and sort of first customer for a lot of these direct air capture companies. And next slide. So just quickly wanted to touch upon some of the barriers to scale for direct air capture in particular. One is high costs. Two is around this concept of durable markets. So unlike renewable energy, there's not an existing market for carbon removal. So we need to make sure that there are customers, are people who will sort of offtake these carbon removal tons. And then finally around shared infrastructure, many smaller direct air capture companies face barriers around developing geologic storm dwells and also accessing clean energy infrastructure. And next slide. So in connection to those barriers, I think there's a really great opportunity for the public sector to really partner and accelerate a lot of the progress that's happened on the private sector side and also to sort of address some of those barriers and bring these solutions to scale in the way that we've seen for other climate technologies like solar, like wind. So on the next side, I just wanted to touch upon some of the policy progress that's already happened. Just in the past few years, we've seen funding go from effectively zero for direct air capture and carbon removal solutions to over $1 billion per year appropriated in FY22 for carbon removal solutions. So we've seen the federal government really step up to support these solutions. And I think this is really the reason why we see so many private sector companies enter this space is because the federal government's investment have really laid that foundation. Next slide, please. Quickly also wanted to just touch on some key policies that either have recently passed or have been introduced in Congress. The big ones are the $3.5 billion for direct air capture hubs that was recently passed in the bipartisan infrastructure law. That was also accompanied by some investments for class six well programs, which is funding for geologic sequestration to be paired with director capture, as well as CO2 transportation infrastructure. At the same time, I think we're seeing Congress turn towards the next generation of policy, specifically focusing on things like federal procurement and the bill that Representative Chonco and Peters recently introduced, as well as investment tax credits for director capture. And then finally on the last slide, I think there are a number of policy opportunities coming down the pipeline. Like I said, we've seen really the last couple of years of director capture investment pay off. And we're now, I think able to move beyond just focusing on research and development to also think about how we actually deploy these solutions at scale in a way that's in line with what communities want these projects, how we develop them in a way that is safe and drives benefits to these communities in particular, I just wanted to highlight three quickly. One, updating 45Q to be more favorable to director capture and include a higher price for DAC to storage. Two, federal procurement, creating a long-term durable market for DAC. And then finally, modernizing regulation to make sure that we can both protect communities, but also that these regulations are workable for the startups in this space. So I will leave it at that and really looking forward to this session further on. Thank you so much for that great presentation, really great overview of the issue. We will now turn to our second panelist, Jennifer Wilcox is the principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary in the office of fossil energy and carbon management at the Department of Energy. She is also on leave as the presidential distinguished professor of chemical engineering and energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Jen is the author of the first textbook on carbon capture called Carbon Capture published in March, 2012. She also co-edited the book, the Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer or Primer in 2021. Jen, thank you so much for joining us today and I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Dan. And just a little update, as of two weeks ago, we now have a Senate confirmed assistant secretary and FECM and super excited about that. So Brad Crabtree just started a couple of weeks ago. And, but I am, as you said, the principal deputy assistant secretary. And so thanks for having me here today, I'm really excited to talk about the work that we're doing across Department of Energy as it relates to direct air capture. And in this next slide, I wanted to talk just briefly on overview, the office of fossil energy and carbon management. A lot of what we're doing is really about that carbon management piece. And we actually updated the name of our office on July 4th to include those two really important words. And if you're interested in learning more about the work that we're doing within the FECM office, we released an April or strategic vision, which you can see the cover here. And it goes through all of the priority areas of focus in our office. And the other aspect that I wanna point out here is that as we look at carbon management and even going deeper into that, as we'll do today with direct air capture, all of these pieces are really part of a broader puzzle. If we're truly to achieve our net zero greenhouse gas emissions target by 2050, it's gonna take all of these things that you can kind of see in that image and that puzzle on the right. And it's important to recognize that the tool that we're talking about today is really just one piece of a very big complex puzzle that we're gonna need to do everything at this stage and that there's no one silver bullet solution, but it's really gonna take a portfolio. In the next slide I wanted to also talk about the fact that we shouldn't see direct air capture and broadly speaking carbon dioxide removal as a means to replace deep decarbonization. As we know, direct air capture means that we're taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and the CO2 is very dilute in the atmosphere and there's a number of point source emitters, whether it's hydrogen or cement and steel facilities or natural gas fired power plants. These are all more concentrated streams than CO2 in the atmosphere. It's gonna be always cheaper and easier to mitigate the CO2 at a source, prevent its release from entering the atmosphere in the first place than having to take it back out. And in the next slide, and this builds off of what Gianna already presented is that we really see these as two separate tools. There's carbon capture, which is retrofitting existing units to prevent the CO2 from ever being emitted into the atmosphere. And then there's carbon dioxide removal in which direct air captures one approach in a broad portfolio. And in this case, what we're doing is really looking at the accumulated pool of CO2 in the atmosphere. And on the right hand side, you can get a sense. If we were to look at what it takes, the difference to capture the equivalent CO2 from a point source in the atmosphere, the design, the amount of material to do this is very different for a concentrated source versus the direct air capture components. So in the left hand side, you see a tall, thin absorption column, which is typical of a point source retrofit. And you see six to eight meters in diameter, 22 meters in height. And you need two of these units to capture some amount of CO2. The equivalent CO2 capture on the right hand side takes 10 of these air contactors that are 200 meters in depth or in width and then six to eight meters in depth. And so it's significant capital investment compared to point source carbon capture. The other thing you notice is the design of these units are different. So it's not a blanket solution when we think about capturing CO2 at a point source and capturing it from the atmosphere. They're really different technologies, different approaches. And one of the reasons that you see this different approach is on the right hand side, you have this narrow bed. And the reason why is because you want to minimize the energy required to push the air through the fans. And so in this case, we may only capture 50 or 60% of the CO2 from the air versus a point source, which you can capture say up to 97% of the CO2 from a gas stream. So these are just really different tools. But we need both. Next slide. We launched at COP in November, the carbon negative shot. So this was a third of a series of earth shots, energy earth shots, launched through the Department of Energy. This is really across many offices within DOE, not just FECM, but also energy efficiency and renewable energy and other offices like Nuclear Office of Science, RPE. So we're all working collectively. This is really also associated with our annual appropriations to invest in kind of mid to high level TRL or technological readiness level in order to really get these approaches to a point where we can hopefully learn by doing, get down the cost curve as we scale up from, as Gianna pointed out, thousands of tons of removal today to millions of tons over the next five to 10 years. And getting down that cost curve to hopefully achieve $100 per net metric ton of CO2 removed and to include in that the monitoring, the reporting, and the verification associated with durable carbon storage on a time scale that positively impacts climate. And this approach, the carbon and negative earth shot, it really is looking at all CDR approaches, whether it's coastal blue carbon, accelerated chemical weathering of rocks, using chemicals or minerals for direct air capture. And it really includes everything. And a big effort is associated with trying to standardize across these approaches, developing the metrics for robust MRV across these approaches. And we're really excited about this work and hopefully some of these investments too will go along that pipeline to support some of the work that's gonna be building out the infrastructure through the bipartisan infrastructure law. Next slide. And so here, the way that we're also thinking about carbon removal with direct air capture as part of that broader portfolio is to think really responsibly about it. It's true that carbon removal is a tool to deal with the legacy emissions in the atmosphere, but it's gonna be a while before we actually do that. In fact, we're gonna have to achieve net zero before we really start to pull the legacy or historic emissions out of the atmosphere. We really see in the near term, these approaches as a way to offset or counterbalance the truly, truly difficult to avoid emissions today. And so truly hard to decarbonize sectors include in the near term, aviation, shipping, agriculture. If you look at point source carbon capture, for instance, maybe it's 97% capture. You there's the residual 3% that's very hard and costly to decarbonize to get to 100%. And so we see carbon removal and direct air capture as really a critical tool to achieving net zero and really handling the residual emissions today. Once we achieve net zero, then we'll begin to go backwards and tackle those legacy emissions. Next slide. And just some exciting work that we recently launched and recently announced some of these awards. And what this is looking at is existing utilities today. If you look at nuclear and you look at geothermal, you recognize that there's an opportunity and for instance, in geothermal, there's available waste heat. And when you couple it to a certain type of direct air capture technology using solid sorbents that require lower quality thermal energy, for instance, 80 to 100 degrees Celsius, you can couple to waste heat associated with geothermal. And then in there are other cases, for instance, with the nuclear where the electrons are stranded in some cases and those electrons can be used to fuel direct air capture. And so looking at existing utilities and piggyback really piggybacking on these existing units where the capital investment has already been made and trying to use some of that residual heat from these and power and coupling to direct air capture to try and reduce the costs associated with direct air capture. So that you're really funding the capital associated with the contactor and not the energy piece. And so in this case, we funded a number of projects associated both with geothermal and also with nuclear and as you see on the far right, the picture is waste heat associated with the steel plant as well. And the other piece to mention here is with the utilities in particular, it gives you flexibility because if you think of geothermal and nuclear, these are carbon neutral power sources today. But if they're coupled to direct air capture, they can actually become carbon negative power sources. So this is providing flexibility. And again, thinking about those residual emissions for the hard to decarbonize sectors. So really excited about this work. Next slide. And finally, just to kind of, to give an overview of the work that we are investing in through the infrastructure law over $10 billion of new carbon management funding related to direct air capture, specifically regional direct air capture hubs at $3.5 billion. A DAC technology prize competition, one that's associated with more higher TRL towards the commercial scale at a hundred million and then lower TRL associated with 15 million. But then there's the question of, we capture the CO2 and what do we do with it? And so we need to make sure there's also the infrastructure build out for geologic storage. We have funding in the infrastructure law assist you with validation and testing at $2.5 billion. And so in this work, we are hoping in the next five to 10 years to use this to invest in the build out of between 60 million tons of CO2 per year up to a hundred million tons of CO2 injection per year so that that infrastructure exists. So we're working very closely with EPA to really try to get classics permits through so that we can help to build out this infrastructure so that when you're looking, the private sector is looking at a CCS retrofit or a direct air capture opportunity or even other carbon removal opportunities that require that carbon management downstream that that infrastructure will exist, that offtake will exist. And it will make it much easier for the private sector to be able to invest. The front end engineering design studies at $100 million is really associated with the build out of pipeline infrastructure. And there's also our office is working closely with the loan programs office associated with the transportation infrastructure and $2.1 billion in loans through the loan program office. And then finally, the carbon capture demonstrations in large pilots. And this isn't important also because as we think about investments in direct air capture, coupled to geologic storage, we also want to leverage other investments where we're building out that infrastructure. And you can imagine that we can really take advantage. There's this concept of digging once. So if we're thinking about some of these hub concepts, we wanna make sure that we're really leveraging the opportunities. And as we look at building out some of the CCS and I don't have it here, but even the hydrogen hubs, we could imagine that there could be coupling even with some of the direct air capture hubs in those opportunities as well. And that's something that we just wanna be thinking about. And with that, I will turn it back to the moderator to Dan and happy to be part of this discussion again today. Thank you. Well, we are happy to have you part of this discussion to Jen. And it's incredible the amount of work that's going on at the office of fossil energy and carbon management and everyone's I think very excited to see the recent announcements out of DOE on the funding availability. So that's excellent. Speaking of excellent, we have our third panelist. Katie Lebling is an associate in the climate program at World Resources Institute. She works on research and analysis to inform policy recommendations that can accelerate research, development and deployment of technological carbon removal in the United States. Katie, it's great to see you. Thanks for joining us today and you can take it away. Thanks so much. I will share my screen when we know if that doesn't work. Awesome. Okay, well, thanks so much to EESI for organizing this briefing and to everyone in attendance for joining. So building on Gianna and Jen's presentations, I wanted to talk a bit about some of the considerations related to DAC beyond the necessary carbon removal that it can provide. So this reflects a paper that we released recently from World Resources Institute in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and the link to that paper is on the WRI website and the EESI event page. So just to frame this presentation, we're coming at this topic with the perspective that we will need carbon removal, likely at a large scale and of course alongside deep emissions reductions to meet our global and national climate goals. And DAC is a leading technology that can provide this carbon removal. As Jen talked about, the US government is making significant investments in DAC and the private sector is as well. So we wanted to look a bit deeper at some of the impacts the DAC could have on the ground. So our paper focuses on responsible scaling of DAC which includes among other things, understanding the impacts of building and operating DAC plants on the environment and people. And then given that the impacts of a DAC plant will most directly affect people in communities that host or are near to plants, we provide some considerations related to community engagement, minimizing negative impacts and maximizing benefits. So we think this approach is important also because DAC is a comparatively new technology. So many people are not familiar with it and this kind of information can help provide clarity around uncertainties that can come up and help build public understanding and then acceptance of DAC. And of course, like all infrastructure, we should have an understanding of its ancillary impacts. In particular, since DAC is just taking off in the United States, there's an opportunity to use this understanding to ensure equity and sustainability considerations are prioritized from the outset and to avoid some of the inequities that are associated with historical infrastructure and industry build out. So with all that said, I just wanna jump to one of the key takeaways we had from this paper, which is that even though large-scale DAC facilities could end up looking like some of today's industrial facilities, they're not expected to produce nearly as much harmful emissions. In fact, our research finds that overall DAC plants are expected to produce zero or almost zero on-site emissions that could negatively impact human health or the environment. So with that in mind, the types of impacts I'll be talking about are related to resource usage on-site, land, water and energy usage, materials production that would happen off-site, and then social impacts like job creation. So this analysis also focuses on the two leading solvent and solvent DAC systems that are in development and operation today. But we've already seen, as Gianna mentioned, a number of new DAC companies and technologies coming up that use variations on these approaches or entirely new ones. So the space is developing rapidly and these conclusions will obviously change over time, which is great. So now to take a step back, we wanted to first categorize and organize the landscape of impacts related to DAC construction and operation. We wanted to separate out impacts that can happen locally, either inside the fence line or in the local community, because that's what communities would be most interested in that would be potentially hosting or near to DAC plants. We separate local impacts from distributed impacts, which would come through scaled up supply chains for some of the materials required for DAC, as well as energy infrastructure and or electricity potentially. So we tried to distinguish impacts related to construction and end of life of the plant, which would both be one-time impacts from those related to ongoing impacts from operation of the plant, which would presumably be happening over 20 years or whatever the plant's lifetime is. So within each of these categories of impacts, we quantify at a million ton per year scale, which is the size of or the expected size of each of the four DAC hubs that Jen talked about earlier, and a half billion ton scale, which is the amount of technological carbon removal that the US long-term strategy outlines for 2050. So of course this half billion tons could be larger if we don't do enough to reduce emissions in the near term, and very likely it would not all come from DAC, but for now provides a benchmark for what a scaled up DAC industry could be by mid-century. So another takeaway from our research, which may seem obvious, is that the impacts differ by project. So based on location, energy source, and system type, among other factors. So in our paper, we try to identify what levers cause those differences across different impacts. And for land area, which is shown in the table here, it's very dependent on the energy source that would power DAC. And we assume that large-scale DAC would require dedicated energy capacity, so as not to compete with decarbonization in other sectors. Sorbent plants, which require lower temperatures for their processes could use renewables or waste heat. As Jen just mentioned, while solvent plants could use... Solvent plants require higher heat and use natural gas with carbon capture today, but they could use also renewables for their electricity needs. So of course, this table is not comprehensive of all energy sources and research is underway to expand the suite of options available. And just to ground this in what's happening today, the largest DAC plan in operation, which was on the map Deanna showed is an Iceland capturing 4,000 tons per year, and it's powered by geothermal power. And then there's also this million-ton scale plan in development in West Texas, which would use natural gas with carbon capture. And since it's a system type that requires higher temperature heat. So obviously each of these options has trade-offs that are location-specific and project-specific and should be assessed on a project-by-project basis. Generally, renewables would take up more space than natural gas with CCS, but could be more desirable to communities. And the land use for renewables, particularly wind turbines could also be used for other activities like grazing or offshore. Wind could also significantly reduce land use overall. And I mentioned this before, but just to reiterate these conclusions are based on data that's available today for the leading liquid solvent and solid solvent systems, but research is ongoing, so these will change over time. So we also wanted to understand some of the key material and resource needs at the theoretical scale-up level of half a billion tons that's outlined in the US long-term strategy for technological carbon removal. So we find that DAC at a half gigaton scale would use less than 5% of current and projected US primary energy supply. For construction materials, assuming a linear scale-up from around 10 million tons of DAC capacity in 2030 to 500 in 2050, to reflect that half a gigaton. And assuming half solvent, half solvent plants, less than 5% of annual production of cement and steel would be needed in those years. And in many years, it would be much less than that. And for PVC, it would be a little bit higher at around up to 8% of US annual production. For the chemicals use in DAC plants, we find higher expected proportions of around 19 and 37% of global annual production for solvent and solvent respectively. The supply chain for sorvents is still developing and we need to scale up to meet large-scale demand if that's the type of system that will be reaching the scale while increased solvent production would likely not limit scale-up. So to mention again, a lot can happen between now and 2050 to change these conclusions, but these numbers can kind of help us conceptualize the scale that we may need in a few decades. So another takeaway is that the impacts of these DAC plants, they're all interconnected. So for example, land area needs are in part determined by energy source, which is in turn determined in part by location and project developer. So I think this point is worth considering when you're trying to understand whether and how some of the project-related impacts could be minimized or changed and what the limitations are there in terms of the project configuration. And among these, the energy source, the system type and the location play outsized roles in determining impacts. Even though DAC plants aren't expected to produce meaningful onsite emissions that could negatively impact human health or the environment, they still would take up space, they would use energy and water and they would have other project-specific impacts. So along those lines, the process that determines DAC siting will in part decide who is impacted positively or negatively. DAC's early stage of development presents an opportunity to better understand and communicate expected impacts and potential benefits and prioritize inclusive decision-making with host communities. So this approach could help lay the foundation for long-term success by establishing a shared understanding of project goals and parameters which could allow for more efficient execution and help avoid project delays due to community concerns which can be a result of late-stage community engagement. So this map looks at some of the practical considerations around DAC siting, what's shown here. It's access to renewable energy sources overlaid with access to geological sequestration sites. Of course, DAC plants could also use natural gas with CCS or they could use the captured CO2 and not require geological sequestration. So this map is not comprehensive but just a starting point. And further layer, additional layers of data would need to be added, for example, to map other land use types and constraints like population centers, tribal lands, endangered species, et cetera. And I also wanna mention that several other organizations have done similar mapping exercises including Carbon 180, which released a map with DAC siting considerations related to the DAC hubs funding pretty recently. So one critical aspect that will help determine the equity and long-term viability of DAC scale-up is the assurance of benefits to communities where DAC plants and infrastructure are cited. So there's an opportunity for DAC scale-up to not only remove CO2 from the air but to offer benefits to communities and workers. And benefits could include high-paying jobs, trading or apprenticeship opportunities, local investment in CO2 utilization or other types of living investment requested by the community. DAC will likely also be able to provide additional benefits to communities but more research and creativity is needed there to understand that better. And as Gianna mentioned, analysis from the Rhodian group finds that megaton-skilled DAC plants could provide around 3,000 jobs within the supply chain each with around or up to 300 of those being on site. So we include some recommendations in the paper that I mentioned for federal, state and local governments and the private sector as well. So these aren't meant to be comprehensive of everything. We think needs to be done to scale up DAC broadly but rather they focus on helping to ensure its development and deployment is done responsibly. So procedural recommendations include use of social impact statements or social impact assessments which could be completed alongside environmental impact assessments to ensure social impacts are considered from the outset. We also highlight the potential for the use of legal agreements that enshrine community benefits and project planning including community benefit agreements which are negotiated legal agreements between coalitions of community groups and project developers that guarantee community benefits in exchange for agreement not to oppose a project and labor agreements that can guarantee certain terms like use of union labor or local hiring. So the benefits that DAC plants could offer are only theoretical until they're negotiated and received. So use of the legally binding mechanisms can help ensure that communities have the opportunity to benefit from available jobs and provide a mechanism to negotiate for other types of benefits beyond jobs. At the federal level, the government has made historic investments in carbon removal and in DAC in particular in the past couple of years and has the opportunity to help set precedent for the rules of the road for development of this new industry. So our recommendations include prioritization of meaningful community engagement, use of local labor and locally sourced ideally low carbon materials, encouragement of the use of social impact assessments and legally binding benefit agreements and then others that are outlined in more detail in the paper. And so I wanna note also that there's been a lot of movement in this direction from the administration broadly across its investments and from the Department of Energy around the DAC hubs process and other provisions in the bipartisan infrastructure law. So the recent DAC hubs notice of intent indicated that there'll be requirements around tracking and reporting, project environmental impacts, community engagement and consent-based siting, equity and workforce development and others which is really great. So I guess just to conclude, we recognize the huge potential that DAC presents as a way to help meet our national and global climate goals. So we wanted to understand and be able to advocate for developing and deploying it in the best way possible that's both sustainable and equitable which will hopefully help set us up for long-term success. So I'll stop there and hand it back to Dan. Thank you so much, Katie. Those were great presentation, really excellent slides and a great summary of your report. We were also treated to great slides by Gianna and by Jen. And so quick reminder, if anyone would like to go back and revisit anything that we've covered today, we will archive the webcast at www.esa.org. Also presentation materials are available on our website as well. So if you wanna go back and look at, for example, Katie's charts comparing the different types of carbon removal and director capture, you can definitely do that. Same thing with Jen's slides, Gianna's slides and the same thing will soon be true for Kevin's slides as well, who's our next panelist. Kevin O'Brien is the director of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center and director of the Illinois State Water Survey. These two organizations are dedicated to the use of energy and water resources in a sustainable fashion to drive economic development. A focus of ISTC has been on capturing and utilizing carbon emissions from power plants and industrial sources. Kevin is the principal investigator for the largest capture front end engineering design or feed study in the world and the largest capture pilot in the world. And he leads the 21st century power plant project which combines capture, utilization and energy storage along with a new approach to energy generation. Kevin, I'll turn it over to you and really looking forward to learning about all of your great stuff in Illinois. Thanks Dan and thanks to all the panelists that's really fun to come at the end here and really listen to everyone else and some of your key things. One of the factors that I'll be looking at a little bit differently from the others is really kind of coming more from an engineering perspective. Everyone set it out very nicely that it's important to be able to scale DAC. So now the key question is how do you do that when you look at it from an engineering perspective? And I wanna go back to something that Jen had mentioned. There's definitely a difference between DAC and the traditional capture projects and that's been outlined in the past. But the neat thing is there's some learnings. If you've done these other capture projects and you've had to scale up there's things that you've learned that are applicable when you're looking to scale up these direct air capture systems. And I'm gonna try to cover some of those today and give you a feel for what we're doing in this area. So first, a little bit about the University of Illinois and specifically the Prairie Research Institute. So I'm in charge of both the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center in the Illinois State Water Survey. Those fall under the Prairie Research Institute which is the largest research institute in the University of Illinois. So when you start talking specifically about capture, storage, one of the nice things is having all five of these organizations together really makes it easy when you're trying to scale up technologies whether it be DAC whether it be the traditional capture world because the way that we're organized is first if you're talking about capture then really that is the Sustainable Technology Center that focuses on that. On the other hand, of course, if you're gonna capture what are you gonna do with it you're gonna either utilize it or you're gonna geologically store it. And it's our state geological survey which has been very much engaged in terms of geological storage of CO2. So two, we work together very closely. But the other thing that was alluded back in some of the other talks is you're gonna need water typically when you are gonna go out and do capture. So the question is we're gonna get the waterfront what's most importantly an impact on existing watersheds and so forth. That's something that the state water survey addresses. Then the minute you go and you're ready to break ground, of course, one of the factors that you need to look at is are there any potential artifacts? And that brings in our state archeological survey to if necessary put together a required discovery plan should that come up. Then finally, but also very importantly the question of endangered species and having the natural history survey involved really helps us to be able to determine that. So having all five of those organizations together really makes it great when it comes time when you're not only scaling up but you're moving to that actual build operate phase which we are on a number of DOE projects. And just a note, of course, we don't do this alone. One of the critical things here is public private partnerships. We're a real believer in it. And that's why the relationship building and the networking is very important. We do this in conjunction with technology developers, EPC firms, regulatory groups. And the other thing is we work a lot with the Department of Energy. You saw some of the projects that were involved in, Jenna had mentioned that. We are set up for kind of the financial and project management to be able to handle that. So as a result, we tend to be prime for those projects. And that last bullet point is we're very agnostic when it comes to technology. We are actually working with a number of the major providers when it comes to DAC technologies. We will work with technologies. We know how to handle the IP, make sure there are not issues with that. And that's very important to us because our goal is really to find the right technology to place in the right location. That's very critical for us. Now, let's talk a little bit about scaling up capture technologies. How do you do that? And again, the interesting thing is those curves, these scale up curves are actually very similar whether you're talking about DAC or whether you're talking about traditional capture types of projects. So, let me step you through that. The first step is typically a feasibility analysis which asks the questions is it gonna be economical or the regulatory barriers or their technical barriers are scaling up the technology. This is a very early stage kind of study which will then hopefully lead you to what we call a pre-feed study where you're addressing these issues a little bit more. And just to let you know the feed that acronym stands for a front end engineering and design study. That's a real key stage. If you're going to scale up a technology if you're gonna really eventually do an actual build you need to go through this feed stage and you can see this progression. Now you've addressed these questions in a little bit more detail. Now you reach this feed stage where you're doing a full feed. Here you're doing the basic design, a detailed design. You're really looking at those regulatory issues. Hopefully your financing is complete so that you can move on to the build operate stage. Really, we're talking about here you've reached the situation where you're almost shovel ready. So hitting this feed stage and these feed studies are really critical because they tell you what are you ready? Can you move on to build operate stage or do you need to go back and do some other things? And of course, that's where we all want to get to. We want to talk about scaling up getting these technologies out. So we want to reach this breaking ground stage where we're actually going out building and operating. So this is true for DAC, it's true for the traditional capture but I'm going to come back to this again because it's very important to follow this process. You can't just immediately jump to the build operate phase and that's something that we have to keep in mind as we actually go through and mature these technologies. Real quickly, here's a list of what we're doing in the capture area and we're involved from early stage stuff at the lab level to what we call the small pilot all the way to the large pilot full scale types of operations. Here's obviously some of the traditional capture projects going on. These outlined in blue are specifically ones which are related to direct their capture and some of these were mentioned earlier where we're looking at, for example, can you scale to 100,000? Here are some that are scaled to 5,000 tons. We're looking at use of geothermal nuclear renewables and here's actually one where we're combining in utilization. There's going to be two that I really focus on today and the first one is going to be this one because it's the one project which has started and then the other one is going to be this one and that's because it's the one project that couples in utilization along with DAC. So I'm going to just give you an overview of those two projects. I think they're really key because as we heard earlier trying to address this, there's a number of variables and frankly the only way you can sort out those variables is really go and actually do the tests, kind of do the feed studies and then hopefully move on and actually build some of these because you don't really know what you don't know until you go out and build things. So let's now dive right into the two DAC projects that I've talked about and talk about some of the considerations that come in mind for that. So I want to again come back to, and we talked about that earlier and some of our other speakers talked about the difference between DAC and traditional capture. I'm going to be a bit more specific here because we are involved in some of the world's largest traditional capture projects post specifically post combustion capture. And I think it's important for everyone just to kind of understand from a generic engineering perspective what's the difference between those two. So here happens to be this is for our large pilot where what we're doing is it's traditional coal plant you're going to be putting a capture plant right at the end of that. So you're capturing the CO2 from the flue gas. Now notice a couple of things about that. First, take a look at where you're putting this in place. You're putting that capture unit at the very tail end. It's just before the flue gas is going up the stack. So you're putting this in, these are all traditional methods to pull out knocks socks, particulates, mercury, other pollutants. So you're putting it downstream from that. So the first note is in traditional capture world you have to be able to fit that into the existing process. The second one is of course how are you going to drive this capture unit? You're going to do it based on utilizing heat and power from that power plant. And of course you want to minimize the use of it or do it in a very efficient fashion. If you don't do that, you're going to effectively what we call derate the plant and you don't want to go there. As I mentioned before here, you're capturing the CO2 from the flue gas. And this was alluded to in some of Jen's diagrams as well. Here, typically, for example, in this particular plant, the CO2 levels in that flue gas are actually at about 11%. And of course that's going to vary depending on whether you have a coal plant versus natural gas. Now, the other thing we need to be aware of is when I'm capturing that CO2, I'm also going to have some residuals present in that flue gas. Some of that is going to be knocks, socks. It could be some heavy metals and so forth. So my system needs to deal with that. And then obviously if I'm going to take the CO2 and do something with it other than geological storage, I need to be aware of what are the levels of these things present? Have I removed them? If not, do I need to remove them? So a couple of very, very critical factors there when you're designing for these systems. Now, let's talk a little bit about scale. The other factor is when you're doing these large point systems, typically we talk about it could be anywhere from at a very, very minimum of 100,000, but typically if you're talking about much larger facilities, it's usually well above a million tons of CO2 per year that you're capturing. So these are very, very large volumes that you're dealing with. And that's really key because there's been a lot of work to take a look at capture units that can do that in a very economical fashion. And I also want to emphasize, I want to go back to one of the other slides shown. Remember, these things have been worked on literally since the late 90s. I've been involved in the capture world since 1999. So that gives you an idea. There's been a lot of work going on. Now, let's look in comparison DAC. And remember from some of those slides, really there's been with some earlier DAC, but things really started taking off roughly in the 2018 timeframe. So I think it's also important for people to realize DAC is a much younger technology. So be aware of that when we kind of look at the various metrics. Now, the other unique thing about DAC, this happens to be an outline of the Climeworks facility in Iceland. Here you can see, and I'm saying that the capture unit location is flexible. In other words, since you're pulling CO2 from the air, you don't have to necessarily have that coupled with the plant. And in fact, this one is with a geothermal power plant, but you'll see that there are some other studies that we're looking at with coupling it with various renewables. So I would argue there's a little bit more flexibility there. And the other interesting thing is, and you'll see that in some of our studies, you can pull either the heat or the power you need from multiple sources, which again gives you more flexibility. Of course, here you're capturing CO2 from the air. So as a result, your CO2 levels are in the PPM level much lower than you're talking about for traditional capture. So it's gonna be more challenging. It's just from a thermodynamic perspective, it's gonna be a more challenging separation to do. But importantly, it can be and it has been done. And the other point down here is that you don't see these residuals. Remember I talked about all these residuals that you'll see up here when you're connected to a specific large source. You don't tend to see that because you're pulling from the air. So you don't have the issues that you have in the traditional capture world. So some important thoughts from an engineering perspective when you're going out and you're designing these systems and when you're scaling them up because there are some good things that are advantages of DAC. But of course, I'd say the big challenge is it's at the lower PPM level. So one of the key things, again, is how do you address this? And we've been very fortunate. We've had a number of projects in place with the Department of Energy. And one of the ones I wanted to talk about which has already started, we're roughly maybe about a third of the way through is a really great one where what we're looking at is we're taking, in this case, it's happens to be the Climeworks technology and we're looking at three different locations. We're doing a feed study and we're saying, okay, what would it take in these three different locations, Louisiana, California and Wyoming, to scale the Climeworks technology to 100,000 tons of CO2 per year? So a nice feed study, which really will help you to determine what are the issues there? You've got another variable, which is now different locations. So you can see the effect of different climates there. It's gonna be very important for that, of course, since we're doing a feed study to look at from a construction perspective, are there differences in costs? Are there differences in timelines? In these three locations, what's the concern of that? And again, this type of, there's a lot of exciting things happening, like the whole hub concept and so forth. This is this drill down engineering, which is now gonna provide information to people so they can now really look in detail and find out what are some of the differences when you're going in different locations. And obviously when we're doing that, the other factor is there's, is there a difference in techno economics? We're gonna do a life cycle analysis because clearly with a life cycle analysis, you don't wanna create more CO2. You wanna make sure you're doing the positive thing in pulling out the CO2. And then a business case, no, you know, if there's not a good business case, no one's gonna invest in it. So those are some important factors that we're looking at. You can see we've got a really nice, diverse team that includes national labs, as well as private sector companies and EPC firms. This is an 18 month project. And like I said, we're about a third of the way through it right now. And we're in the process of kind of developing the design basis for this. So to me, this is a really important project because it set the stage in so many different areas. So for example, here's the three different locations. You can see the volume. We're using different power sources as well. We're looking at solar, geothermal, as well as a combination, and this is a neat one of waste heat plus wind. So this is waste heat from a gas plant coupled with the renewable source. We're also looking at a couple of these are already existing. This is gonna, this would be a whole new solar facility that'll go in. And again, you can see our partners that we have which are very regional specific. We're looking at different climates, which throws an interesting factor. And needless to say, in all these situations, we're gonna be storing the CO2. So that becomes a factor. And then the minute you look at the full supply chain, the answer is, how do you deal with transporting it to the storage site? That's another really critical factor. The last one I'm gonna talk about is the direct air capture plus utilization, better known as DAPU. And this is another exciting one because it's the one that couples utilization with CO2. We are not doing geological storage here. What we're actually doing is, this will be up in the Chicagoland area, where what we're doing is we're pulling off of the Gary works in Indiana, we're taking waste heat. We'll be using the carbon capture ink technology to capture the CO2 from the air. And then we'll couple that with carbon cures technology, which is a commercialized technology. So we'll take this captured CO2 and then incorporate that into cement into Ozinga's ready mixed plants. And the neat thing is, of course, this is obviously commercialized, this is commercialized. So we've effectively decreased the amount of technology risk involved in here. Right now, Ozinga actually goes out and buys the CO2. So this provides to them a very attractive way of utilizing the CO2. And here we're looking at 5,000 tons a year in terms of the captured CO2. So kind of some parting thoughts for you is again, there's a lot of analogies between when you're scaling up these traditional capture projects as the DAC ones. But I also wanna emphasize that in order to do this, we really need from an engineering perspective, boy, there's four factors that come to mind to me. And the neat thing is a number of these I know are under development at NETL. First is I think I can't emphasize enough the importance of these feed studies that DOE puts out there. It's really important. And I really like their strategy do the feed ups upfront. This way you understand the technology gaps that could inhibit Scala. Now you can address these issues early in the process rather than waiting, waiting, waiting. And then, oh my gosh, now how are we gonna deal with these challenges? I think that's really gonna help the whole Scala process. The other thing is, many people ask, well, why do we have to go out? Why do we have to build these systems? Well, because there's a thing called learning curves that are true for any technology. And I have a number of references here that are really good ones that talk about for different energy technologies, why do you do this in order to drive down costs as a result of what are called learning curves? So you've got to go build, operate. And that's why, again, this whole process of moving to large pilots and demonstrations is really, really important to move this technology around. The other, the third point is, I think that, and I know under development is kind of a set of standards to determine the techno economic analysis for DAC. That's being developed by NETL. And this to me is a really key one. They've done the same for post-combustion capture. I call it the Bible, so to speak, for post-combustion capture. They're working on the same for DAC. That is gonna be absolutely critical as you're going through and scaling it up. And my last point is, in the traditional capture world, we know that it follows this plan, a bench, lab, small, large, and then demonstration. And I think that we're starting to kind of get a handle on what would that be for the DAC process? And it's really good to know because this answers that famous question if you've ever been in the car with people and they say, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Well, here you know how long you're gonna go before you're there, so to speak. And I think by helping to establish what this looks like for DAC, that's gonna be really important. That's gonna be able to set, let's say that the expectations correct for different investors and people at large. So at this point, I'll stop. I'll acknowledge all our great partners. This was, we can't do it without these partners. And we look forward to continuing to do this research and working with the DOE on scaling up these technologies and they'll stop there. Thanks, Kevin. Gianna and Jen and Katie, I'll invite you everyone to turn your videos back on and we have a few minutes left for Q and A. And if anyone in the audience still has a question they haven't submitted yet, you can send us an email ask at esi.org, that's ASK at esi.org or follow us on Twitter. The first question I'd like to ask has to do with underground storage. And it's something that, I mean, Kevin on one of your slides, you're talking a little bit about, transporting the carbon that's been captured to different sites and one of those sites could be an underground storage. What are the limit, and Gianna, I think we'll start with you since it's been a while since we've heard from you and then we'll go through the list. I'm curious, what are the limitations? Are what are the main limitations to storing carbon underground? Are they technological? Are they geological? Are they financial? And what do we know? How can we be sure that carbon stored underground today will remain underground 50 or 100 years into the future? Yeah, thanks so much, Dan. I'm happy to start and I'm sure other folks on the call have different perspectives as well. I think the good news is that one, the US has very abundant geologic reservoirs for which we can safely store carbon dioxide. And we also have decades of research on geologic storage through the Department of Energy that have really provided a test case for this technology. So we have pretty great certainty and confidence that for fairly low costs, we can store carbon dioxide underground. And with robust monitoring, we can ensure that it stays there over long periods of time, which is what we all really care about for the climate. So I think the one sort of barrier around geologic storage that still exists today is just really around the regulatory system. So making sure that we can effectively permit what's called the Class 6 Well program under the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure that we can get direct air capture plus storage projects actually deployed in the US while also making sure that we're providing the appropriate safeguards. Jen? Sure, thank you. Yeah, so just adding on to what Gianna was saying, I will say we have definitely expertise associated with dedicated storage, CO2, deep underground. Kevin alluded to Illinois and that was our first project where we've got the Mount Simon Sandstone where we have a Class 6 permit and have been injecting CO2 from the Bioethanol Plant ADM project, I think started in 2013. And we have been, we also have 40 years of expertise storing CO2, deep underground, have been doing it since the 80s without leakage associated with enhanced oil recovery. And it's, you know, from that industry we have expertise with handling CO2. We have pipelines for transporting CO2 because of that industry. And there's a lot that we can leverage in terms of the learning and the expertise. So we absolutely know how to put CO2 deep underground and we know how to do it because the same trapping mechanisms in which the oil and gas were born are gonna trap CO2. So it's really about reversing the flow of carbon back underground using the same trapping mechanisms that have been used for those systems. And so we also at the Department of Energy have been investing in decades of the work that's associated with the monitoring of CO2 to be able to watch, look at the plume, deep underground to understand how it's moving or not in the subsurface. And then also have it above ground monitoring techniques with the classics permit that Gianna was talking about. We are also working closely DOE and EPA together in terms of EPA Groundwater Protection Council and also working on communication with different regions and communities to be very, very transparent about what the risks are in terms of injection of CO2 deep underground but also being very, very clear that we've got four decades of expertise and we know how to monitor it. We know how to really deploy the equipment to minimize any kind of risks associated with that CO2 sequestration. Thanks. Katie? I think Gianna and Jen covered most of it. I was gonna mention the classics while permitting being one of the main limitations today and obviously the more of those that go through the short of the timeline we'll get with learning and experience. I think the other piece which Jen also mentioned is just the kind of education and outreach component around this and communities where this will be happening, making sure that they understand what it is, what the potential impacts are, how they could benefit, would be really important to building understanding and acceptance of it. Kevin? I think our other speakers have pretty much done a great job of nailing it. I wanna also emphasize the discussion about the Class 6 and there's a number of states right now that are addressing primacy issues. Those are gonna be key in order to move forward with the geological storage. Thanks. We have a question that just came in from the audience and I think this one might lend itself to sort of a lightning round. So Gianna maybe we'll start back at the top of the order with you and the question is if you could go into a little bit more detail about maybe one or two products that captured carbon dioxide can be fully or partially made into. What are one or two that maybe are top of mind either for potential or for being common uses or common products made from that? Yeah, absolutely. I think two that immediately come to mind for me are one aviation fuels and two building materials including cements. I think those are both two industries that I think to Jen's presentation are difficult to decarbonize. We don't have readily available cost effective solutions for those industries today. So the extent to which we can find the interconnections between using CO2 for jet fuel or concrete allows us to decarbonize those solutions and also use those products to help finance the development of direct air capture. So I think finding those synergies between the different industries is really valuable. So from here on out, it's gonna be like family feud. John, I just gave two answers. We can't have those answers come up again. So it's gonna get harder. But Jen, one or two products that you'd like to highlight for our audience that can be used beyond aviation fuel and building materials. Well, building materials is pretty broad, right? Okay, fair enough. I mean, I will say I really do like the concept of carbonates, which is the building materials. You know, I mean, because you can use them in concrete, you can use them in roads. I think it's also interesting. I'll try and add another kind of flavor to what Gianna was saying with the building materials. There's also a green design component here in that we could maybe even engineer some of these materials to have improved performance than conventional today. So we're not just making a quote unquote green product, but we're making a better product. And an example of that is, is that when you use a carbonate in place of sand and gravel and concrete or a road, you can actually increase the reflectivity of the material. So you can have a cooling effect versus asphalt, which is absorbing heat and has that warming effect in cities. And so you can think about it that way. You can think about stronger materials, more robust materials that can last longer. And the thing that's nice about the building materials is that they are locking the carbon away. And so those types of approaches to me will have higher value to those that re-emit the CO2 back into the atmosphere. All right, great. That was really helpful elaboration. Katie, do you have any one or two products that maybe you'd like to highlight? I was gonna pick concrete aggregate as well. I think the durability and also the fact that it is one of the few products that's produced at a gigaton scale, globally makes it one promising pathway along with seep illustration. So I'll just stop there. I agree with what the other said. Kevin, this is where you get to show your creativity. Well, first of all, we're the U of I, we're located in central Illinois, which is an ag area. So my first response is algae. And why is algae important to us? And we have projects where the CO2 is being used, utilized to grow algae, we then harvest the algae, we can use it for animal feed, we can use it as for biochar as a soil amendment. So that's a real important application for us. Another one, we're working with a small business to develop incorporating the CO2 and dimethyl carbonate, which is used in the birth production of believe it or not batteries for electric cars. So what a neat connection there utilizing CO2 for a battery for an electric car. So those are my two pitches. Great, well, job well done all across the panel for the lightning round. We are just about out of time, but I would like to just get one more on the record. And Katie, I think perhaps we'll start with you this time. And I'm curious if you could help us imagine or help our audience imagine, say 10 years from now, if all goes well, what does the state of direct air capture look like in 2032? What's the scale? What are the other new applications? Are there barriers that had been removed? And then we'll go, Kevin to you and we'll sort of continue in the order, but we'll start with Katie. So I think the scale is an important question. I think like Jen alluded to in the how much do we need, understanding where we really need direct air capture to balance our residual emissions. We don't wanna have to rely on too much DAC. So I think, but in the near term, I think we do need to build out a variety of different technologies in different locations with different energy sources, just to create that diversity and try to understand which systems work best, what the learnings are, how to optimize that. So I think seeing in 10 years, seeing a variety of scales, different locations, just different combinations. And yeah, I think the scale is tough, but I would hope for maybe tens of millions of tons, but I'll let others answer that, it's difficult. Kevin, we'll go to you. Thank you, Katie. What I see is what seems to be coming together with having a lot of talks about is, we've talked about DAC, we've talked about traditional capture. We're seeing them starting to merge. So in other words, industrial facilities that are gonna do, let's say traditional capture, but then also be surrounded by DAC units or better yet, with the advent of BEX, couple of BEX with DAC. Wow, if you wanna get negative, that's gonna really make it negative. And I think people are gonna really look at DAC as that type of thing that's gonna take you from just, oh, I'm down to net zero, that's gonna make me negative. And I have no other way to get negative, so I'm gonna do DAC. And I think you're gonna see a lot more emphasis of that. John. Yeah, I think definitely agree with Katie and a lot of the points that she made. I would love to see us deploying direct air capture at the tens of millions of tons scale if we're waving our magic wand. I think in addition to that, the point around diversity of technologies is really important. We have a couple of direct air capture companies today that are really ready to scale their technology, but we have so many new startups who have entered the space in just the last couple of years who are developing really novel technologies, new types of sorbents, new types of storage that don't involve geologic reservoirs. So really thinking about how do we not just deploy, how do we reach scale, but also how do we deploy a diversity of technologies that really drive down costs, drive technological breakthroughs, all the things that we need to do to get to 2050. I think in addition to that, some of the software things are gonna be defining models of community engagement, having a better understanding of some of the impacts on the ground, and hopefully also having some sort of longer term markets or incentives to scale at that point as well. I'll guess I'll go next. So I would say first in response to Katie, yeah, if we're not at millions of tons in the next decade, we're in trouble, we're not gonna make it in time. So we don't have a choice, we have to get there. And when I showed the plot of hard to decarbonize and residual emissions, it still adds up to a gigaton by mid-century. And so we absolutely need to be on millions of tons and preferably tens of millions of tons in the United States in the next decade. And it's gonna be critical. I think success would be not just that scale, but how we cite these projects and where we cite them and the maps, the map that Katie showed too, overlaying and looking at the communities and recognizing that there are co-benefits to communities, especially those that have been suffering from pollution in the past. When you look at ports, when you look at industrial, as Kevin alluded to as well in some of these industrial areas where there's high pollution of steel or cement, when you look at direct air capture, you're not just scrubbing the air of CO2, but you're gonna ultimately have to scrub the air of particulate matter, of socks and knocks. The selective CO2 chemistry that captures the CO2 will be inhibited if there are those other contaminants there. And just as Kevin showed with a conventional power plant, you have all those scrubbers in place first so that the actual CO2 scrubbers work for CO2 because socks and knocks are acid gases also and stronger than CO2. So we really should see these as air scrubbers that are actually have a significant co-benefit of scrubbing the air of other pollution as well. So I think it would be a success if we could see our investment lead to those benefits. Thank you, Jen. That was a great way, a great last word for our briefing today. I'd like to thank our panel for excellent presentations, John, Jen, Katie and Kevin. It's been very nice to meet you and get to know your work and we really, really appreciate your expertise. This is behind the scenes. This has been an extremely anticipated briefing here at ESI. Everyone's been really, really looking forward to learning more about this technology and the potential for direct air capture. So thank you so much for your excellent presentations. I'd also like to say special thanks to Representative Tonko for joining us today with his introduction. Brendan and the rest of Team Tonko, incredible staff and so thanks also to them for helping to make Representative Tonko's participation possible. Like to close by also thanking my colleagues at ESI who actually do all the work. So thanks to Dan O'Brien, Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna and Savannah and also to our summer interns, Christina, Stephanie and Abhi. This is their second briefing and they're already real aces at the briefing notes and the live tweeting and all of the other things that they help us out with. So thanks so much to you as well. My colleague, Dan O'Brien, just put a slide up. This is a survey link. If you have two minutes in our audience, if you have two minutes and you would be willing to share your comments, we read every response. We acknowledge that we're not able to get to every question, but we really appreciate everybody's thoughts. Did you have any questions or any problems with audio or visuals or presentation materials not downloading or ideas for future topics? So we really appreciate all of the feedback that we get from that. That will do it for today. I would just like to remind everyone that we will be back next week on June 2nd for building out electric vehicle charging infrastructure. That's one that is near and dear to our heart also at ESI because of all of our work on transportation electrification. And then after that, unfortunately, we'll be learning about wildfires as part of our Living with Climate Change series. So our ping-pong between solutions and adaptation and resilience challenges continues. Thanks to everyone in our audience for joining us today. And if you haven't yet RSVPed or subscribed to Climate Change Solutions, this is a great time to do that. I wish everyone a great rest of your Wednesday, Wednesday, I think. So have a great Wednesday everybody and we'll see you back next week for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Thanks so much.