Transforming CO2 into value: The technology enabling low-carbon building materials

Ryan Fan: Welcome to The Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focusing on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape. I’m your host, Ryan Fan. Please join me as we explore today’s most pressing issues with special guests that will give you some new perspectives and help you make sense of what really matters.

Apoorv Sinha: How do the finishers feel about applying this material on the ground? Does it work just the same as normal concrete? And being able to show all of that while telling the carbon story, I think is really important because ultimately, if you can get the green benefit and do that without making life complicated for anyone else in the supply chain, that is usually a very easy sell.

Ryan Fan: On today’s episode, we’ll dive deeper into carbon utilization by exploring how carbon dioxide can be used as a resource to, quite literally, cement the foundation for a low carbon economy. Carbon capture utilization and storage or CCUS involves technologies that capture carbon dioxide from various sources, such as from large power plants or industrial facilities, and then be transported and stored in biological or geological systems underground. The U in CCUS refers to a range of applications through which captured carbon dioxide is utilized either directly or indirectly in various products. We’ll explore the role that carbon utilization can play in industrial decarbonization and examine a specific case study involving the cement and concrete industry. Please welcome my guest, Apoorv Sinha, founder and CEO of Carbon Upcycling Technologies, a Calgary-based carbon tech company. Before founding Carbon Upcycling, Apoorv worked as a research manager for Zero Core Technologies, managing projects in collaboration with more than 10 universities. He also co-founded T-O-H-L, a humanitarian logistics startup conducting water infrastructure projects in Chile and Kenya. And he has served on the board of directors for the Alberta Clean Tech Industrial Alliance. Apoorv is a Forbes 30 under 30 awardee and a Clean 50 honoree. Apoorv, welcome and thank you for joining us on today’s episode of the Sustainability Agenda.

Apoorv Sinha: Thanks for having me, Ryan. Good to be here.

Ryan Fan: Good. Well, clearly you’re a collaborator, an entrepreneur, humanitarian. So help us understand how you got to this point in your life and why did you found Carbon Upcycling?

Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, Ryan, I think more than anything, I really identify as an engineer. I would say, a big focus of mine ever since I was in my early teens was around problem solving and trying to see if I could solve riddles and, small challenges here and there and try to keep myself busy. But I think as I got older and definitely as I was going through my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, a big focus of mine started pivoting towards technical problems that I felt could do some good. You mentioned in the introduction, the work I was doing with TOHL, or T-O-H-L, that was a startup I founded with a friend of mine right after the Haiti earthquake, where we’re looking at ways of getting logistics organized really quickly after a major humanitarian disaster and trying to help save lives through a rapid deployment of pipelines, as an example. And in a sense, that was also the genesis that led me to Carbon Upcycling, as I’m sure many of your listeners would agree. I think a big challenge that we face now is some tangible, actionable work that we can do around the climate. It very well could be defined as the problem of our generation. For me, there was a huge technical kind of reason for starting to go down this path. And I think more recently, you know now that I’ve been working at Carbon Upcycling for just over 10 years. Other things have happened in life. And I’m also now a not so young dad of two little kids. And I think that has given me another sense of much deeper perspective on why the work that we’re doing on carbon capture and utilization has a much deeper meaning than just this you know technical kind of nerdy side of me that just wants to solve a problem and feel smart.

Ryan Fan: That’s fair. Apoorv, so your company has been recognized for its innovation. You’re a Carbon XPrize X Factor Award winner, a recognized global clean tech 100 company, and a Reuters Top 100 innovator. So clearly you have good technology. How does it work? And what makes it unique? And maybe if you could talk about what types of feedstocks are supported.

Apoorv Sinha: Absolutely, Ryan. I would say more so than some of the awards that we’ve won in public media, I think it is the validation by the industry that probably gives us the most confidence that we’ve got something that really works. And we’ve been able to get, a range of different major cement players with operations across the world, not just invested in projects with us, but invested in the company itself. And this includes companies like CRH, CEMEX, Titan, and projects with many other names that some of your audience might be familiar with. But your point, why are they working with us? Why are they interested in us? And really it boils down to doing what is ultimately not very dissimilar to the high school chemistry lessons we would have done where you know you take an acid and you take a base, you mix them up in a beaker and you neutralize these two materials to make a salt. In our case, the core innovation around Carbon Upcycling is how do you carry out that same type of chemistry? But instead of doing that in a beaker where you have to use a lot of water, how do you do that with gaseous and solid feedstocks? And so the idea here is to take CO2 directly from a flu stack or from an emission source at an industrial site, like a steel plant, a cement plant, even petrochemical plants, and take these dilute streams of CO2 where out of what’s coming out of a stack that you might see on the road, only about 4%, maybe 10%, maybe 20% of what comes out of the stack is actually CO2. And so, you know, it’s relatively dilute and many technologies converting carbon emissions into valuable products require you to do what they call carbon capture, which is essentially to take that four or 10 or 20% CO2 and hyper concentrate it to 99% purity so that you can use it to make fuels or to make chemicals. But in Carbon Upcycling’s process, you’re able to use that CO2 as is, and then chemically combine that with some solid materials to make low carbon building materials. So the idea here is that you take a solid waste, which could be the range of feedstocks that I’ll talk about in a moment, and you combine that with CO2 emissions in your gas waste, and you take these two wastes to make a building material that is actually strong. It can help you with creating climate resilient concrete, and it can also help you create a material that has a much lower carbon footprint and in fact can capture CO2 instead of emitting CO2 which is currently the baseline of, for example, the cement industry. So just getting back to your second question about the different feedstocks that we work with, Ryan, that is probably the other key innovation that has really helped us gain the traction that we have, because we haven’t just worked with a couple of pristine minerals that maybe are only available in certain localities. We’ve actually done a huge amount of R&D work over the last six to seven years where we’ve shown that we can take a range of slags that are produced by the steel industry or coal combustion ashes that are left behind by decommissioned coal power plants. We’ve done work with mine tailings. Ah so you know, tailings that are produced by materials that are used to make cat litter, for example, or nickel mines and copper mines. And some of the tailings that are produced as a byproduct of doing those operations have all found themselves to be really suitable candidates for a technology like ours. And essentially what this means is that whether you have a cement plant in the Philippines, in the south of India, in the east of Poland, or the southern edge of California, you’ve probably almost certainly got a feedstock that we can work with that allows you to incorporate our technology into your operations. And we found that to be a really intriguing and compelling value proposition for our customers.

Ryan Fan: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I can totally understand that. I’d like to focus now a little bit on the role of carbon utilization in the decarbonization of heavy industry like cement and concrete. Your company has operated a commercial demonstration facility in Alberta since 2021, providing low carbon cement production. So first, what lessons are you learning from the demonstration that is helping you to commercialize at scale? And scale being the key word. And second, as you scale, what benefits does your technology offer to producers and their value chain?

Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, as you can imagine, Ryan, you know construction, just given its ubiquitous kind of exposure to modern human life, is a very risk averse industry. Right? And so whenever you’re trying to introduce a new product, a new technology, especially something like ours, that would actually go into the floor that you might be walking on or in due time, the bridges that you would be walking over or driving over. The level of scrutiny for these kind of products and technologies can be quite severe. And rightfully so. I think one of the lessons that we’ve learned with the three, three and a half years of production that we’ve had out in the field is that, there’s a lot of focus on changing standards to apply these new materials into the commercial space. But what we have found is that the regulatory work and this standard compliance work is really just the beginning of your journey, of winning the clients over, not the end. And I think for early stage startups like us, you know, back in 2021, we kind of had our blinders on and we thought, okay, we’ll just get ASTM compliance, EN compliance, CSA compliance, and we’ll be off to the races. Well, it turns out that’s literally only the beginning to get you in the door with many of these civil engineers and specifiers. What you really have to do is then leverage that work that you’ve done, you know, the durability work, the strength work, to then start getting these engineers on a project by project level to start feeling comfortable with what you’re doing. With the 3,000 odd tons of material that we’ve now deployed in Calgary as an example, we’ve been able to get engineers that work on home building, work on sidewalks, do other structural projects like slab on grade applications and retaining walls. And we’ve been able to start getting them some firsthand exposure to how our material not only performs from a strength and performance characteristic, but also from an applicability standpoint. How do the finishers feel about applying this material on the ground? Does it work just the same as normal concrete? And being able to show all of that while telling the carbon story, I think is really important because ultimately, if you can get the green benefit and do that without making life complicated for anyone else in the supply chain, that is usually a very easy sell. But that’s not an easy value proposition to come up with on day one. You kind of have to work for many years, get a lot of proof of concepts in the ground. And being able to work with our local partner here at Burnco, which has allowed us to get to a wide array of different end users of concrete, has helped enable that for us. And I think that’s really kind of the blueprint that we want to use for other partners as we get other projects off the ground.

Ryan Fan: Yeah, that’s a great model to approach scale for sure.

Apoorv Sinha: Going at it alone is extremely difficult in such a fragmented market.

Ryan Fan: And being able to have so many different feedstocks, making it so applicable to so many different types of end users. Yeah, that’s definitely a recipe for scale for sure. I want to talk a little bit about supply chains now. Supply chains have been a topic since the pandemic. There’s been a push towards on-shoring or near-shoring of supply chains. Now, with the incoming Trump administration, there’s the added expectation of tariffs to further encourage the on-shoring of supply chains with the concept of factory America. So, Apoorv, can you share with us your perspectives on this and how Carbon Upcycling supports the on-shoring of supply chains related to cement?

Apoorv Sinha: You hit on probably what has been the most compelling value proposition of our technology for many of the different cement players that we work with. And ultimately, it just boils down to having your own supply chain under your control as much as possible. What we’ve seen both in Canada as well as the US and frankly, most of the Western world, is that many of these supplementary cementitious materials or even just raw cement is coming from further and further away than it ever has. And some of this has to do with the aging infrastructure that we have to make these building materials. You know, the 97 cement plants in the US or the 16 in Canada are some of the oldest cement plants in the world, because even much of Western Europe after the Second World War had this incentive to start rebuilding a lot of their cement infrastructure. And a lot of the cement plants that you see in the Eastern US, Eastern Canada in particular, is over 50 years old and hasn’t really had much of a need to advance and modernize itself. And so what this means is your cost of goods sold in a cement plant in North America generally tends to be a lot higher than modern cement plants that you’ll see in India, in Thailand, in China. And what this also means is that the production volume that you can get from this built infrastructure is a lot lower than what is expected to be demanded over the next few years. And that’s a bipartisan thing. Even with the Republicans winning now and who knows what happens in a few years from now. I think there’s a general consensus that infrastructure building has to be a key mandate, regardless of which party is in power, both north of the border or the south. And given all of this, I think what we have found is that a lot of the work that we’ve done on the versatile ranges of feedstocks that we’re able to activate to use as building materials allow for local materials to be upcycled and create local jobs, as opposed to, as an example, getting a third of our raw materials to make cement being imported from offshore. Right now, the US produces about 95 million tons of cement a year. Over 30 million tons are imported from offshore. These are coming from China, Vietnam, Thailand, Greece, et cetera. And the thinking is that over time, if we’re going to really tell this story in a coherent way, talking about how green infrastructure can actually create local jobs and local advantage for the economy, the best way to internalize this is to essentially locally source as much of the material as you can so that all the jobs that are created in the supply chain are being created within the sphere of what’s a tax base for a given country. And I think to your point, this concept of factory America or factory Canada is something that we’re seeing strongly resonate even before what happened with the elections and some of the discussion that is happening now around tariffs and things like that. But our general view is that this is also the best way of creating the most carbon impact per ton of new material produced because if you’re making a low carbon product halfway around the world and then having to haul it over ship or whatnot, you know it does eat up a lot of the benefits that you produced. And so, local jobs, local emission reductions, local tax-based improvement, we think that these are all very strong tailwinds that hopefully will result in a lot more capital investment in technologies like ours, both in the US as well as in Canada.

Ryan Fan: Yeah, I can understand that. There’s definitely great alignment there. Apoorv, recently you closed a round of equity funding. So you clearly probably have some updated perspective on how to go about raising venture capital in this marketplace. Can you explain to our audience maybe how venture funding and climate tech has evolved over the last few years? I’m sure that our project developers in the audience would appreciate your views here.

Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, absolutely, Ryan. I can share what we learned from our Series A experience in the first half of 2023. We’ve seen a big change in the venture capital mindset and generally just the private investment mindset since the end of the CERB era in late 2022. And when we started to see interest rates kind of go up to curb inflation. And essentially what we’ve seen is, pre let’s say fall of 2022, there’s a massive focus on moonshot ideas, on looking at things that could create a lot of benefit over a longer time horizon. You know, like people were happy to look at companies that would be not generating revenues for five, six years and only get to the proof of concept at scale, maybe in early 2030 or, maybe even later than that. What we saw in 2023 when we raised our Series A and frankly with the investors that we’ve been in connection with since then is that there is a much more pragmatic perspective on the type of technology that people are trying to deploy. I think this also coincides really well with what we’re seeing with the fact that we’re only five years away from our 2030 stage gate for hitting net zero by 2050. And so a lot of these companies are beginning to take a lot more of a pragmatic approach to what can be deployed over the next couple of years and scale thereafter rapidly so that it really makes a dent in their emissions profile and some of their venture capital return mandates as well going into the second half of this decade. Overall, my view would be that technologies like ours that have always kind of used the cost effectiveness and the ability to integrate into existing supply chains and existing footprint maybe did not get the attention back you know a couple of years ago that they’re beginning to now. And we’re not only seeing the strategic venture capital groups, the corporate venture capital groups really double down and start focusing on deploying these technologies at scale, but also with the private venture folks seeing a similar I guess, siphoning of a lot of resources towards that type of story. And curious if you would say this has been the theme of this year as well and also what you might have in mind for what you think 2025 looks like perhaps.

Ryan Fan: I could talk about private funding, whether it be private debt, private equity, late stage, early stage venture all day long. I think that there are a number of factors that are influencing the private markets right now. Obviously, one of which is, this increase in rates has created a bit of a backlog for monetization of private equity and venture positions. And as such, naturally, investors are looking for more near term payback, right? They want to shorten the life cycle of monetization of their portfolio. They’re not necessarily looking for moonshots that are going to take 10 years now, like you said. They’re focused more on things that are a bit more practical in near term from a monetization perspective. And that naturally flows through everything from venture cap all the way to late stage private equity. And I think that has to continue for a while until we see an unlock in the private markets. At the tail end of the private side, you’re seeing extension funds, secondary funds come in. And they’re basically vehicles to allow companies to stay private longer.

Apoorv Sinha: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Fan: But it doesn’t necessarily help the original fund that needs to monetize after five or seven or 10 years. Right? But until we get that tail end to unlock, which is typically traditionally IPOs of companies, Or M&A. Until we get that unlock, we’re going to have more and more of these early stage and private capital investors focus on, like you said, near-term monetization as opposed to moon shots. So yeah, I think it all aligns for sure. And interest rates have a lot to do with it. The lower the interest rates, obviously it’s going to be easier for the M&A activity to actually happen and create that tail end to unlock.

Apoorv Sinha: Do you feel that that switch is gonna happen in 2025 or it might take a little bit later before we hit the inflection point?

Ryan Fan: I think it might take a little bit later. Rates are coming down, but they’re coming down slowly. We’ll see what the threat of all these tariffs do to the potential risk of inflation coming back and rates staying a little bit higher than what people think. I am not a rate strategist, so don’t quote me on it, but I think it’s going to probably maybe take a little bit more than just 2025 to unlock it all. Let’s close this conversation out with a look to why you’re Canadian based and what needs to happen for Canadian based climate tech to actually survive. So earlier this year, Carbon Upcycling was selected to join the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers 2024 cohort. The only one in Canada. So why is it important for Carbon Upcycling to be Canada based? And what do you need as an innovator or a project developer from the Canadian government to help you scale your business and industry further?

Apoorv Sinha: I moved here about 13, 13 and a half years ago, having lived in a few different parts of the world. And I would say that, by and large, Canada has a very progressive innovation ecosystem to help companies ideate and actually move those ideas from, just a back of a napkin to research collaborations like the dozen or so that I was managing a few years ago that ultimately led to what we’ve got at Carbon Upcycling. I think where Canada has a lot of room for improvement, frankly, is taking a lot of that earlier stage work that we’ve gotten very good at based on the university foundations that we have and the type of research infrastructure that we have in the country, and actually taking that past just that early stage seeding and investing work all the way out to building multinational companies that can have global impact. And I think at some point this boils down to ambition. You know, you’ll see a lot of finger pointing sometimes behind closed doors where the private sector will blame the government for not being progressive enough. And then you’ll see the other way around. But I think ultimately the one thing that we’ve seen having now been able to get both Canadian as well as American private investors on our cap table is that there is almost inherently, it seems, a difference in the risk appetite than many American groups are willing to take versus Canadians. And I think, is not something that I think is inherent, although I use that adjective earlier. I do think that it has to be willed upon itself. And I think sometimes Canadians can look at a total addressable market or specific technologies within the perspective of what they’re exposed to with their businesses, but not necessarily looking at the entire world and how much bigger the market can be, not just for technologies like ours and building materials, but just in carbon sequestration and some of the skill sets that our companies have built in the energy sector that could be deployed to do large scale carbon capture and storage in due time at massive scale with global impact. And so I think ultimately, I’m not sure if this ambition comes from the government or if it comes from the private sector. But what I will say is that I think as Canadians, we need to take a much harder look at how do we will ourselves to act as global leaders because ultimately it might just be the level of ambition that we take on and the amount of time over which we maintain it that will determine whether we can continue to have an outsized impact on our fight against climate change.

Ryan Fan: I could talk with you for days about this. We’re so good at innovating, but our track record on commercializing at scale, the innovation that we create within our borders, it’s a struggle. Yeah.

Apoorv Sinha: It’s frankly abysmal. You talked about the two routes for exits for private companies, Ryan. You talked about the IPO market and you talked about the merger and acquisition market. For any kind of successful Canadian company, the question is always asked, do you want to do both those paths within Canada or do you want to go outside? Do you want to list elsewhere? Do you want to get acquired by non-Canadian company? And the fact of the matter is, I’m sure the data would show this, the heavy majority of successful companies do go elsewhere. That ultimately is, to your point, something that people need to talk about. And we need to ideate around this and create some ways. I think the Canada Growth Fund is doing a great job of trying to internalize some of this and creating these additional late stage pools of capital to help with this kind of work. But ultimately, you know this is not just something that one vehicle by the government can solve by itself. I think this needs a much broader conversation across the country.

Ryan Fan: Yeah, like you said, it’s a change in perspective and mindset to have that ambition. 

Apoorv Sinha: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Fan: That’s great. This has been a ton of fun, Apoorv. Love chatting with you. Thanks for taking the time to join the show today. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

Apoorv Sinha: Thanks so much, Ryan.

Ryan Fan: Please join us next time as we tackle some of sustainability’s biggest questions, providing different perspectives to help you move forward. I’m your host, Ryan Fan, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.

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