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A Sustainable Twist On Carbon Emissions: Podcast With Dioxycle
76 Plays8 months ago
Join us in the latest podcast episode where we explore the groundbreaking work of Dioxycle, a trailblazer in the field of carbon recycling technology. Co-founder and CTO, Dr. David Wakerley, shares how Dioxycle is transforming the climate crisis by converting harmful CO2 emissions into valuable, energy-rich products.
📚 RESOURCES & LINKS
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- Website: https://dioxycle.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dioxycle
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/dioxycle
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dioxycle4082
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This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
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Host: Dunja Jovanovic
Executive Producer: Marko Bodiroza
Creator: Nathan Harris
#cleantech #sustainability #podcast
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Transcript
Introduction: Clean Tech Innovations with David Wackerly
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello hello you are watching or listening a brand new episode of the green new perspective podcast your go-to place when you want to learn about innovations happening within clean tech, natural tech, biotech and agri tech space. If you're following the sustainability scene then I guess you're well aware of the relations between co2 emissions and
00:00:18
Speaker
climate change. Today we have a guest. His name is David Wackerly. He's a CTO of a company called Dioxycle. And they're actually harvesting carbon emissions and turning them into valuable products. So if you want to learn how they do that and how their company is operating, stay tuned and meet David.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast, David. Hi, thank you so much.
Dioxycle's Mission and Ethylene Focus
00:00:50
Speaker
It's an honor to be here. Can you tell me more about carbon emissions? They're a huge global issue. So how is your company working to address this challenge? Yeah, of course. So at Diarch Cycle, we make technologies that can produce
00:01:02
Speaker
sustainable chemicals at affordable prices and just to give you some context there production of chemicals the commodities that we use every day generates huge volumes of emissions we're talking on the millions and millions of tons per year for every given chemical and what we do a dark cycle is we find a way to decarbonize the production of one chemical in particular which is ethylene.
00:01:24
Speaker
so ethylene is the world's most used organic chemical it is currently produced through a very carbon intensive process called steam cracking this is where you take some fossil fuels you heat them up like crazy hundreds and hundreds of degrees until you crack the fossil fuels down into something called ethylene that process produces hundreds of millions of tons of co2 every year and what we do at dioxico is find a sustainable route
00:01:49
Speaker
produce that ethylene so that you no longer rely on that steam cracker which is responsible for so many emissions. And just to give you an idea of the scale of decarbonisation potential we can achieve by preventing that dirty fossil process, to give you an idea of
00:02:06
Speaker
what we use it for. I take for granted that ethylene is something that I, the word I use every day but maybe most people don't know exactly what we use ethylene for. It's the most used organic chemical so it's literally in, I can't say everything, but it's in a lot of your packaging materials are made from ethylene, a lot of textiles, a lot of fibers,
00:02:26
Speaker
can be derived from ethylene. You can turn it into pharmaceuticals, you can turn it into polyvinyl chloride, which is PVC, which is then every single window frame you use, every piece of guttering, every pipe you use in your house that's made of plastic, that comes from ethylene. It's a 180 billion dollar market just to give you an idea of the amount of ethylene we use every year that's currently responsible for over 200 million tons of CO2
00:02:52
Speaker
released. The goal of the company is if we can decarbonize the production of ethylene, then we can derive all of the products I just mentioned, your textiles, pharmaceuticals, different packaging materials directly from carbon emissions. No longer relying on the fossil industry to produce these things, directly producing these vital chemicals and feedstocks from either directly from
Electrochemical Conversion Process
00:03:17
Speaker
an emission source, so from a very concentrated source of carbon, or eventually from the air. So directly from the carbon we currently have in the air, which is becoming such a problem for the global climate. Got a company called Lanzatech. I don't know if you've heard about them. They're making ethanol and they are doing carbon recycling.
00:03:38
Speaker
And then they had collabs with brands like Zara, Gucci, made perfumes, clothes, you name it. Yeah, so I am aware of Lanza Tech. We've spoken to the CEO of Lanza Tech before. She's an incredible
00:03:53
Speaker
incredible person with really neat technology you can think of it in a similar way but where is the tech they're using microbes to produce a sustainable ethanol we're using electrolysis so we're. You doing it in more of a chemical engineering sense we're not using a biological means to produce that.
00:04:11
Speaker
that chemical where we're designing a electrochemical process, a process that can take electrical energy and convert it into chemical energy in order to do the transformation. So the electrolyzer is normally something I have with me to show you, but it's essentially a series of plates. In between each plate is a catalytic core and the catalytic core is responsible for the transformation of an emission.
00:04:35
Speaker
into ethylene. So we design catalysts that provide the perfect environment with very little energy input, convert carbon emissions into ethylene. That's our process. That's what we design. The way I look at it is it's like an engine, but it does the opposite. So an engine takes fuel, it takes oxygen, and it produces energy as well as carbon dioxide. And what we do is take carbon emissions, give them energy with our electrolyzer to produce high value chemicals, which are essentially similar to fuel like molecules.
00:05:05
Speaker
I can get way more technical, but I feel like I'd start to bore people. Can you can you now tell me about the milestone that you feel like you achieved since you started the company? Yeah, of
Scaling from Academic to Commercial
00:05:14
Speaker
course. So we began the company from academia. So we were used to academic scales, let's say. So postage stamp. You would be writing papers about electrodes around this size. I know this is a podcast, so I shouldn't use my hands. But let's say postage postage stamp scale. So very, very small electrodes.
00:05:34
Speaker
In our first year, we took that up to something a bit more akin to a postcard and then to several of those postcard scales. Now we're working over 3,000 times larger in scale than that initial scale up. So that was our first major breakthrough. The first milestone we overcame was making sure this technology could work at scale and then
00:05:57
Speaker
Beyond that, that was, yeah, that was a rough couple of, I wouldn't say rough couple of years because it was really fun and engaging, but we weren't incredibly hard, let's say. So our ethos was we have a technology to build. The only way to build a technology quickly is to throw yourself at it until you start to have breakthroughs. And there's, you know, the first.
00:06:15
Speaker
18 months was just overcoming hurdle after hurdle in that scale up. And then beyond that, we've begun to focus on the efficiency. Energy efficiency of the electrolyzer is really key to making it work affordably.
Tackling Energy Efficiency Challenges
00:06:27
Speaker
And so our subsequent milestones have been all about making the catalysts convert carbon emissions into ethylene with as small an energy input as possible. Where do you feel you had the biggest challenges and have you overcome them? And if yes, how?
00:06:42
Speaker
Great questions. The biggest challenges have always been related to energy efficiency, the energy efficiency of the electrolyser. So the way we see it is the electrolyser is basically taking energy, taking electricity and using that electricity to create something more valuable. If you give me, let's say $50 worth of electricity, I have to use that $50 worth of electricity to create, let's say $80 to $100 worth of
00:07:09
Speaker
ethylene and the more efficient the catalyst, the more ethylene we can make with that electricity. If our catalysts aren't efficient and you give me $50 of electricity, I turn that into let's say $40 of ethylene. I don't really have a working business model in that case. All of the challenges have been about increasing the energy efficiency of that process so that we can make as much ethylene per unit of energy we put into the electrolyzer.
00:07:34
Speaker
It's really the team. It's really the team of process engineers, chemical engineers, and chemists, research chemists, all working together, informing each other of what is, isn't possible, and, you know, supporting each other, essentially. Throughout that process, it's led to these breakthroughs we've had in energy efficiency. And did you have any collaborations? Not right now. No, we kept everything internal. We're still very small.
00:08:04
Speaker
As a company, we obviously are 23 people now between Paris, France and San Francisco, California, or Menlo Park, California, to be more precise, to be honest, have been just focused on internal milestones, improving what we've developed so far, pushing the technology to its limit before we begin facing a more external collaborative environment to begin the next stage, which would be the industrialization to initialization of the technology.
00:08:32
Speaker
And have you thought about how you're going to promote your product or the services? We don't do much promotion, let's say, because we are more focused on a few of the biggest emitters in the world, providing the technology directly to them. And that is more about internal discussion and just showing them that we've built a technology that is able to improve their carbon footprint quite drastically whilst giving them security in their ethylene supply. So we don't really have to do too much promotion. We just have to make the technology work.
00:09:01
Speaker
And as a company, that's I think what we strive to do is just prove our message through our technology. If the technology works, it's greener at the same price as fossil ethylene and easy to operate. Then I don't think we have to promote it too much. It should set itself.
00:09:17
Speaker
I'm asking that because a lot of my guests here were mentioning that communicating anything about new tech could be a challenge, not just for potential collaborators or partners, but for the investors as well, because it's much easier that you get, well, it's probably, you know, like a bigger chance is you're going to get investments or partnerships. You have someone on the other side who knows what you're talking about.
00:09:41
Speaker
and understands your technology. Yeah, no, I think you can see from my description of the technology, even on this podcast, it can be very hard to get across the idea in a way that is exciting. And honestly, I understand that you really have to meet your audience halfway, right? You have to be able to explain the technology in a very
00:10:00
Speaker
clear way, explain the chemical engineering breakthroughs in a clear way, which doesn't lose people. Even the investors, there are incredibly intelligent people sitting on the teams of these venture capitalist investors, but they can't know everything.
Navigating Policy and Technological Advances
00:10:18
Speaker
We have to really explain why the technology is going to be a big deal and why we've been able to make advances.
00:10:24
Speaker
without speaking for half an hour. That's a real challenge. I hope I'm achieving it here. I'm not sure.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, you do. And I suppose our audience is already, you know, somewhat introduced to technologies like yours. I've mentioned we had some guests who do a similar type of thing. So, you know, maybe they'll be interested to explore more about what you're doing. I wanted to ask you, where do you see carbon capturing market and how, like in the next five years, how do you see it evolving? A good question. I mean, it depends from my side on two things, the technological advances. So that's more from the
00:10:59
Speaker
company side the companies who are working on carbon capture we have to make the technology affordable and efficient enough at scale to really provide a working viable route for a potential client and then it comes from as well the the policy side we need more attention on policies which encourage the adoption of carbon capture and utilization technologies i will just quickly add darkcycle is a carbon utilization company so the carbon capture part that is the yeah yeah yeah
00:11:27
Speaker
the concentration we don't do so much, but in general the conversation I think broadly covers both carbon capture and utilization. We need policy in place that can support the adoption, the rollout of this technology because there's a cost curve to everything. The cost of producing our technology at this stage is higher than the cost of producing some fossil power technology, some very
00:11:54
Speaker
well-established TRL-9 technology we can't compete with. So we need policy in place to help us with the rollout in order to basically make us for now competitive with the fossil alternative, which will give us the time we need to bring down all of the costs about technology, which will eventually allow us to displace
00:12:15
Speaker
that fossil equivalent. I see it happening in the US right now. We're still waiting to hear from the EU's response. So the dark cycle is between the US and France. So we have one lab in Paris, France, one lab in Menlo Park, California. So we're equally interested in the policy on either side. The EU hasn't provided as clear
00:12:37
Speaker
from our perspective, a guideline for carbon utilization technologies compared to the US. Because in the US, you have the 45Q tax credit, which gives you a set value for every ton of carbon you utilize. And with that, you can build some very nice financial models, begin to work out exactly where and how you're going to be profitable as a carbon utilization company. In the EU, we don't quite have the mechanisms in place to do that right now.
00:13:02
Speaker
That's somewhere where as a company we are trying to, we're currently working on and trying to push as hard as we can, lobby as hard as we can on the European side too. Because again, this global warming, climate change is everybody's problem. So we really need to see the policy in all countries work towards supporting this utilization technology. Otherwise, we are going to need more time to get it off the ground. And if the lobbying part works, where do you see the taxi cycle in the next
Goals for Sustainable and Competitive Ethylene
00:13:28
Speaker
five years? How do you see the company evolving?
00:13:30
Speaker
Diactical right now is in the pre-industrialization stage, so we are validating the final technological milestones we need to achieve in order to say this technology not only is producing sustainable ethylene, but it's producing that ethylene at a price point, which can compete with fossil fuels. At the same time, we're building our first industrial demonstrator of the technology, so that will be one that will be representative
00:13:57
Speaker
of what the technology is going to look like at the industrial scale. We're working on that right now. Obviously, there will be some bumps in the road along the way, but provided that goes well over the next year or two, we will begin rolling out that technology onto potential client sites, proving the technology works.
00:14:13
Speaker
obviously monitoring that technology in order to continually improve the efficiency of the conversion process until we are, I don't want to say until global domination, because it makes us sound evil, but until this technology is really just displacing the fossil alternative. That's our goal. We want to stop those millions of tons of CO2 emissions every year from ethylene production.
00:14:34
Speaker
And in five years time, if we've got 1% of the way there, we will be very happy because that already represents a huge number of CO2 emissions every year. Hopefully we're like 100% of the way there, but obviously we have to be realistic with our goals.
00:14:46
Speaker
If we had a person who wants to start a company and wants to make an environmental impact from what they're doing, what advice would you give to them?
Advice for Aspiring Environmental Entrepreneurs
00:14:57
Speaker
Great question. From my side, and I think we touched on it just a second ago, but it's technology and team. Number one, the most important thing for any startup is that you have a technology that is working better than any alternative. You need to focus on technological development.
00:15:13
Speaker
in order to achieve your milestones as you show consistent progress on improving the technology and in the end offer technology to decarbonize that really offers a financial advantage and that's what we've focused on from the very beginning and the way you can build a more efficient technology is by hiring an incredible team and I can't
00:15:34
Speaker
speak highly enough of the team we have at Diarch Cycle. And in particular, my co-founder has been incredible at finding profiles from all over the world and just bringing them into the team at Diarch Cycle. And that's key. Having a motivated, skilled, passionate team with a technology that is progressing is a great feeling. Let's put it that way. It's a roller coaster. There'll be times where it's tough.
00:16:01
Speaker
And you have to just push through a number of brick walls headfirst. And that job, that if I can complete that metaphor, that whole pushing yourself through a wall is a lot easier when there are 20 of you all pushing in the same direction with all their force compared to, you know, you on your own.
00:16:19
Speaker
slamming your head against the wall. A good team and a good technology is really the key. So make those key hires. Find people who are as passionate about you, maybe people who know things that you don't know about, and bring them in. Keep them happy, keep them motivated. And I would say one thing we make a conscious effort to do as well is to be with them in the lab. Because being a founder, you can sometimes
00:16:43
Speaker
You get offered conferences and you'll get offered podcasts. I know I'm speaking on a podcast right now so I'm a complete hypocrite. It's time consuming when in reality what really matters obviously some promotion of the technology needs to happen and some drumming up investor interest also needs to happen but the key is to be developing the technology. So prioritizing that development being with your technical teams
00:17:07
Speaker
I think is really the piece of advice I would give to anyone looking to do the same thing. Thank you, David. And my last question for you is, where can people find you, learn more about a company, ping you, send you DMs if they want to learn more about what you're doing, if they want to maybe join a team or have some suggestions.
Resources for Clean Tech Enthusiasts
00:17:24
Speaker
And if you have some communities that you can recommend to our listeners and to other clean tech people who are listening to the podcast as well, Slack communities, Discord communities, website, whatever you know and maybe have been a part of that might be useful for other people in clean tech. So if you want to find out more about Dioxcycle, you can visit our website dioxcycle.com. There you can find out more about us, the team, the technology we're working on and some of the recent news and
00:17:51
Speaker
and hires we've made. We were fortunate enough to be selected in the inaugural cohort of the Breakthrough Energy Fellows Program. Breakthrough Energy is Bill Gates' venture capital company who are devoting themselves to funding projects which are able to decarbonize over 500 million tons of CO2 every year.
00:18:12
Speaker
And the Fellows programme is a really great starting point for any company looking to get a climate innovation off the ground, out of the lab scale, into a real company. So there's a really strong community there, which I would encourage anyone with a new idea to look into and apply to. There's also My Climate Journey is a podcast, which is very, very good for finding out new ideas. Obviously, there's this podcast that I will plug as well. I'm not sure of that. I'm not sure.
00:18:40
Speaker
All podcasts are equal. I didn't want to plug one over the other. And in general, it's been really useful for us is just as soon as you get into the climate tech conference space, you'll meet a number of other equally enthusiastic founders, the perfect peers to have in this environment, because being in a startup is the beginning of a startup in particular is incredibly hard. And you're having problems that most people haven't faced before. It isn't something you'll find a YouTube tutorial that can solve.
00:19:08
Speaker
And going to the conferences like, for example, ARPA-E is a conference in the US, ran by the DOE.
00:19:16
Speaker
that is full of founders looking for government funding, looking for government contacts. And that's a great community to get involved with. I was formerly a researcher at Stanford, and they also have an incredible community over there who are all looking at new ways, new technologies to decarbonize. And I recommend anyone there looking at some of their publicly available resources, some of their lectures that they have there are from founders or from climate visionaries who are really pushing the boundaries of what
00:19:45
Speaker
is possible with climate tech. So I think I couldn't recommend that space enough. Thank you, David. This was great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
00:20:03
Speaker
Well, we've come to an end of this episode of the Green New Perspective podcast. Sponsored by New Perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech lens only. If you want to learn more about our sponsor, check out the info in the description of this episode. And if you want to give us a boost, consider following us on socials, subscribing to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform, leaving us comments and reviews. We really appreciate that.
00:20:31
Speaker
Hopefully you enjoyed this episode and I see you in the next one. Bye!