Turning CO2 emissions into value

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

Beatriz Molero: Where SeeO2 Energy is different from others is that we convert emissions onsite and that allows us to help our customers close the carbon loop. We’re also providing them with solutions to different problems, for example safety, the logistics and cost of gas transportation and storage, and emissions reductions.

Lisa Raitt: Welcome to our multi-part series, profiling female entrepreneurs enabling Canada’s energy transition. Our guests in this series represent innovation led cleanup energy start-ups incubated through the University of Calgary’s Energy Transition Centre. CIBC fosters the energy transition ecosystem through strategic investments in academia, including at the University of Calgary, to enable a more inclusive and sustainable economy. Today, I’d like to introduce Dr. Beatriz Molero Sanchez, who’s the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of SeeO2 Energy, and that’s S-e-e-O2 Energy. SeeO2 Energy is a Canadian clean tech company that converts CO2 into clean fuels, and Beatriz is an accomplished researcher with a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Calgary. So today we’re going to discuss carbon capture utilization and storage or CCUS and how it breaks down CO2 emissions into clean fuels and chemicals. And a little bit about how we can use this to generate power or heat, and of course, the benefits for high emitting industries. Hi, Beatriz. Thank you very much for joining us today. I appreciate you coming on The Sustainability Agenda.

Beatriz Molero: Hi, Lisa. Thanks for having me. I’m really happy to be here.

Lisa Raitt: Awesome. We hear a lot about CCUS. It is a technology and it’s a growing industry as well. Can you describe for us the role of the technology and why is it so important for high emitting industries?

Beatriz Molero: Sure, it is quite a new term and I’m happy to try and explain it a bit better for everybody. There are several types of different technologies within what we call CCUS. There are technologies that target CO2 capture and it can be either directly from the atmosphere. That’s called direct air capture. Or from different flue gas sources. There are also several types of technologies that target CO2 storage, and that’s the S in CCUS. And perhaps the most well-known ones are geological storage. But we can’t forget about the U in CCUS, which is the newest and less known part of CCUS and it stands for utilization. So in this field, CO2 is utilized or converted into other useful products. So for example, CO2 and or water can be converted to other chemicals and there’s different ways. It could be thermochemical, photocatalytic, biochemical, thermolysis or electrochemical processes. So for example, at SeeO2 Energy, what we do is we convert greenhouse gas emissions into high value fuels and chemicals in a net negative carbon process. And I mean all of these technologies are very important for high emitting industries. And even as we make our way through the energy transition, we all know that we need all kinds of technologies from incumbents to new technologies in the short and long term and CCUS really do represent an important part or area within all of this for high emitting industries.

Lisa Raitt: Yeah, and it’s interesting because you’re right, some of us may hear CCS, which is just carbon capture and storage. This is CCUS, which has the utilization piece and that’s the area that you’re focusing in on at SeeO2 Energy.

Lisa Raitt: Correct.

Beatriz Molero: So how is your technology different from other solutions?

Beatriz Molero: Well, there are lots of great solutions here in Canada and worldwide. Where SeeO2 Energy is different from others is that we convert emissions onsite and that allows us to help our customers close the carbon loop. We’re also providing them with solutions to different problems, for example safety, the logistics and cost of gas transportation and storage, and emissions reductions. So our technology really is based on recycling our emissions. In the same way we’ve learned how to recycle glass, plastics or metals. So we provide cleaner feedstocks to the industry, to industrial players by converting the emissions on site and producing cheaper and more reliable gases. And we or SeeO2 Energy technologies, we have the flexibility to produce sustainable gases and feedstocks such as carbon monoxide, hydrogen and syngas. Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen and also oxygen. And really all the end users are steel lots, but steel manufacturing, energy industries, utilities and green specialty chemicals.

Lisa Raitt: Okay, so the customer base is quite broad that there will be a lot of people who can actually apply it. Are there any barriers to scaling this up?

Beatriz Molero: There are no particular barriers or no reasons to scale this technology up, just like any other new technology or any hard tech that’s not a software or an app. It just needs extra capital investments and the right team to do it.

Lisa Raitt: Okay, so deployment really is just about getting it out into the field.

Beatriz Molero: Correct. And that’s currently what we’re trying to do this year. Yes.

Lisa Raitt: Excellent. And who would be the ideal customer for you for this technology right now? You’ve got a lot of people out there listening right now. Who do you want to pick up the phone and give you a call, Beatriz, and say, we want to buy SeeO2?

Beatriz Molero: We have Atco here in Canada as an investor. We have Repsol in Europe, we have ArcelorMittal. But I think I’ll use the metal industry as an example. The metal industry is one of the highest emitters in the world. Steel producers currently use coal in their blast furnaces to produce their steel. If we’re able to replace any conventional feedstock, coal feedstock with any of our feedstocks, with any CO2 energy products, carbon monoxide, syngas or hydrogen. The steelmaking releases three tons, three gigatons of CO2 yearly. That represents 7 to 9% of the global total emissions. If we were to use our feedstocks, we can reduce those emissions by 70%. That’s two gigatons of CO2 removal per year. So I mean, the metal industry is an ideal customer, but really anybody that can use any of the products that we make for emissions and on site.

Lisa Raitt: You can use some of what you capture, you can use it for power and for heat.

Beatriz Molero: You can. Absolutely. In fact, our own technology, which is something we don’t talk about because it can get complicated. Our own technology can be used in reverse and we can use the same gases to generate clean power in remote areas. They’re reversible systems. But we’re currently focusing on the one side on the-

Lisa Raitt: What motivated you to establish SeeO2 energy?

Beatriz Molero: Well. I mean, I’m a scientist. I’m a chemist by training. I did my undergrad and my master’s in Spain, and I really specialize in solid state chemistry. And then I moved to Calgary to work at the University of Calgary with Professor Viola Birss. She’s a very well-known electrochemist. And there I co-invented the tech with my co-founder Paul Addo and CEO, and really towards the end of our PhDs we had filed a few patents, we had industry traction and we saw an opportunity to improve how this business is done and we took it and jumped in. I mean, we both had to make a decision after I personally wanted to go into academia, I had a position that I had to accept at MIT, and I decided to co-found the company instead.

Lisa Raitt: So that takes an awful lot of guts. I mean, it’s really tough. We talk about commercialization and the need for commercialization from academia research into the private sector. And a lot of it has to do with PhDs like you saying, gosh, can I, can I really go out and do it? So what motivated you? How did you get up? Like pretend you’re talking to a roomful of women in STEM because we know we need a lot more women in STEM. What would be your advice to the next generation?

Beatriz Molero: (laughs) I mean, what has worked for me, it’s work hard and play hard. I mean, but seriously, I think I would encourage any woman or girl interested in pursuing STEM to really think, ask around, ask questions, find role models, find mentors. Most people are open to help. They’re open to give advice and mentor and show you what a career in STEM can look like. And they will and they can look very different. Don’t fall into stereotypes. Don’t be afraid or just care about what others think. Most of all, go for it. What do you lose? You don’t lose anything, but you may gain a lifetime of a very interesting field full of passionate people.

Beatriz Molero: Yeah. How tough was it to jump into business?

Beatriz Molero: It was an adjustment because we came from a very different world. But we know how to learn. It’s the one thing we know how to do is we know how to learn. So we just took a steep curve to learn how to learn business again and maybe to make our way through stereotypes that academics cannot be business people, but everybody learns at some point. So that’s, we just had to learn and get going.

Lisa Raitt: That’s great. There’s a lot of talk about the importance of carbon capture utilization and storage when it comes to making sure that we hit our emissions targets. We want to make sure that we’re doing our part in the world. But what do you think is the outlook for the industry in the short term between the next 12 and 24 months?

Beatriz Molero: Well, I think that we have a bright future ahead of us. I really hope to see more capital investment in emerging technologies everywhere. In Canada in particular, I would like to see faster deployment. There’s lots of great early stage technologies and talent, but we need risk takers both in the private investment sector, the government agencies, large corporations. It’s really well known that in Canada in particular, we have a huge funding gap in early stage climate tech. That’s right after seed stage and before field demonstration and right after that is a very important stage of any start-up. It’s a critical time, but I’m really excited to see what the future brings really in this field.

Lisa Raitt: Well, we’re excited for you as well. I’m looking forward to seeing SeeO2 Energy being deployed across the country for the appropriate reasons. And I want to thank you so very much today, Beatriz, for joining us on the show. I want to thank our listeners for tuning in just to hear all about CO2 energy. Thanks a lot.

Beatriz Molero: Thank you Lisa.

Lisa Raitt: 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, Lisa Raitt, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.

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