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Climate Takes Ammonia
27 Plays2 months ago
Welcome to Carbon13's podcast "Climate Takes" where we ask special guests for their "takes" on their industry and climate challenge, as well as setting a call to action, asking what will it take to solve the climate emergency?
On Climate Takes Ammonia, we're talking about the chemical that feeds half the world, is a $230 billion industry, and is key to a clean hydrogen future.
But which right now is the most polluting chemical process on earth.
To make one tonne of ammonia, two tonnes of emissions are generated.
But industry is so keen for Nium's clean ammonia, that they already have a $120 million project pipeline and $50 million in signed offtake agreements, while still at TRL 5.
We'll be getting the story behind those numbers and more, with CEO Lewis Jenkins.
We hope you enjoy the podcast and it becomes a catalyst for you for climate tech innovation too.
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Transcript
Introduction to Climate Takes Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Carbon 13's podcast, Climate Takes, where we ask our guests, founders and investor community, to give their takes on their industry and their climate challenge, and also a call to action to ask what is climate going to take in order to solve the climate emergency.
Neem's Green Ammonia Focus
00:00:28
Speaker
Today, I'm joined by Lewis Jenkins, ah CEO of Neem, Green Ammonia Company. So welcome to Climate Takes Ammonia.
00:00:39
Speaker
The secret of change is not on fighting the old, but building the new. Ammonia is the smelly, ugly sister of the beautiful hydrogen hype train. We need to make tons and then hundreds of tons of the catalysts. And that's what our latest facility with a million pound grant from the UK government lets us do. And that means hard science, hard tech. It does mean significant investment upfront, but it also means huge payoffs. If you can actually demonstrate real and missing reduction,
00:01:09
Speaker
A kid said to me, look, mate, we don't really need you to make us feel better about climate change. You need to go out and do something about it. And I was like, oh, shit.
00:01:24
Speaker
Lewis, welcome. Thank you, Sarah. Very happy to be here. Lovely. um First off, big question. If we're serious about climate, why would we be serious about ammonia?
00:01:38
Speaker
Oh, a couple of reasons. um For a start, ammonia production is already the most polluting chemical industrial process on our planet. ah It consumes roughly 1% of total global energy with 2% of total global emissions.
Ammonia's Role and Challenges
00:01:55
Speaker
It is also of interest because it can burn as a clean fuel. It burns with no CO2.
00:02:00
Speaker
um And it's also quite a good hydrogen energy vector. So it's got around, trebled the energy density of even compressed hydrogen, ah but it's much cheaper and easier to store and transport around. um But the main thing is is that it's ah basically responsible for half of global food and 2% of global emissions.
00:02:21
Speaker
Because I think a lot of people will have heard about hydrogen is vital to the climate emergency, but I don't think ammonia gets nearly the same amount of air time. No, ammonia is the smelly, ugly sister of the beautiful hydrogen hype train. So yeah, so I mean, ammonia is NH3, nitrogen and hydrogen. um And it is a way of storing and transporting hydrogen. And it's a more energy dense way of doing so. So ammonia is interesting for
00:02:53
Speaker
ah on The N side is what doubles your farmer's yields. The nitrogen, fixed nitrogen is what doubles a farmer's yields. And the H side is the energy side. it It carries hydrogen. Energy is hydrogen. So yes, they are related. You make ammonia from hydrogen. A massive proportion of the hydrogen we make today goes into making ammonia. The trouble with that is that it's gray hydrogen. It's the dirty kind from fossil fuels. so from air essentially using fossil fuels and a very iron-based catalyst which he invented and then Bosch from the family Bosch from the tools and the ones who invented the spark plug more or less as well he took Haber's invention and helped to scale it up to industrial scale so it's known as the Haber-Bosch process the ammonia production process
00:03:46
Speaker
and that puts half the food on our plate, and it also puts half the nitrogen in our bodies. So, by creating the heart Haber-Bosch process, we've been able to stop some wars and feed half the world. What's wrong with it? ah Right, it's it's it's crazy. The world of ammonia is a wild and interesting one. um But essentially, yeah so, Farben won the Nobel Prize for inventing ammonia. yeah um And that went then went out to massive facilities which make ammonia at scale and then was able to deal with what was then ah a real crisis around food in the world. It's also the detonator to the 20th century population explosion. So it's probably the reason why half of us are here.
Innovations in Ammonia Production
00:04:33
Speaker
So ah it's impossible to underestimate really the importance of ammonia. It's more important than um
00:04:40
Speaker
you know almost all inventions that man has done, this this this ability to feed more people on less land, essentially, was critical to us being able to grow the population, doubling the population in the 20th century. Of course, the trouble is it all all built on fossil fuels. And that's been a challenge to us. At the beginning, it was fine, and it didn't matter. And ammonia is also used in lots of other contexts as well. it's used as a chemical, it's used to to to prepare clothes, the materials for clothing, it's used as a cleaner, it's used for plastic treatments as well. So it's become one of the vala Vaclav Smilk or is it one of the four pillars of ah modern um modern society. But yes, to the trouble is that most of it is quite dirty, and most polluting chemical industrial process on our planet. Exactly. And
00:05:33
Speaker
Therefore, neum, how is neum solving this problem? Good question. um So as I mentioned, ammonia synthesis is built around a catalyst and that catalyst operates at very high pressures and high temperatures. um Back in 2019,
00:05:53
Speaker
My co-founder, Dr. UBL New, he's a nanophysicist with ah and a chemical engineer, was working at the yeah UK synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, when he read a paper from Stanford University that predicted that in the future we'd be able to have a new type of catalyst, a nanocatalyst, so nano from the Greek, small,
00:06:15
Speaker
and a nanometer for context to a meter is like a marble to planet earth so not just small bloody small and so ah this paper predicted that it with ah advances in microscopy and advances in our ability to start assembling what are called nano clusters, we might be able to to then increase the surface area of the catalyst, which would then make more of the active surface available to the nitrogen and hydrogen gas that's passed over the catalyst. And that would then allow you to drop the heat and drop the pressure. So basically, with more active surface, you need less energy.
00:06:57
Speaker
And so that was an interesting but a theory, but it was a theory from Stanford. What my co-founder was able to do was put that theory into practice and start assembling the tiny nano clusters using um a massive metal octopus-looking machine called the Matrix Assembly Cluster Source. And he used that. It took him three years, but he was able to start making them. And that's when I met him on Carbon 13, when he'd got his very early stage prototype, the first proofs. and We were at TRL3 back then. um And we've since basically built bigger models of and and prototypes of this thing that works. I'm very pleased to say that now we have a facility running, making the most efficient
00:07:40
Speaker
ah cleanest ammonia in the world. It's a very small scale, but we're very excited about it because it shows that there's a new way to make ammonia, a decarbonized, decentralized, democratized way of making ammonia without a fossil fuel insight.
Scaling Up and Market Focus
00:07:56
Speaker
That's incredible. um What TRL level would you be at now? So we're at TRL 5 with the ammonia synthesis itself.
00:08:08
Speaker
um And we've got a pilot planned early next year, which takes us to TRL 6 and then on to 7. And we are at TRL 6 with the industrial scale-up technology. And that's important because it's all about doing the stuff in the lab.
00:08:23
Speaker
um but we need to make tons and then hundreds of tons of the catalyst and that's what our latest facility with a million pound grant from the UK government lets us do or at least one hundred up to 100 kilograms a day so we can fulfill the pilots with that. it's it's the So we have one patent filed on the actual technology, the nano clusters, the nano catalyst and then the other is filed on the ability to scale that technology up so to make more and more of those nano clusters to then start replacing the fossil fuel hungry's industrial incumbents. And for our listeners, TRL, by the way, is a technology readiness level. ah goes Indeed. It was a scale that NASA ah worked out, which which helped to understand when you're looking at hard tech, it's got a shorthand for understanding where you are with a hard tech.
00:09:13
Speaker
And the short version is that tier one is like an idea and tier nine is like it's out in the wild. It's commonplace and you see it everywhere in society. It's working. um And that's handy for us because it's a scale of progress where you need to get to. And so we've we've demonstrated our technology now in our seven thousand five five hundred square foot facility at our home, the nanosphere, as we call it.
00:09:34
Speaker
That's TRO5, but we're looking to take that onto TRO6, and that's demonstrated in a relevant environment. so One on ah an industrial site for us would be out in the wild with real-world hydrogen. The good thing about what we've done is, because we've got a big site at at ah just outside Oxford, our nanosphere, ah we've installed electrolyzers ourselves and installed a solid nitrogen nitrogen compressor as well. So we're taking the nitrogen from air on site and we're using electrolyzer just as we would um ah one of our partner sites as well. So yeah, yeah, exciting. And TRO is a good kind of shorthand for helping us manage, engage and manage our progress.
00:10:13
Speaker
I would say it's going to be one of the first questions an investor asks a founder or a founder needs to figure out what is your TRL level. It just, as you say, it sets the stage about where is this company at. like I want to zoom out a bit and actually talk about the industry of ammonia. It's worth hundreds of billions globally.
00:10:32
Speaker
um you have you know You're at your stage TRL level five, six, um and you've already got $120 million dollars pipeline. yeah Who's buying? who are these who's buying who's excited Who's so excited to get their hands on your green ammonia that you've already got $120 million dollars pipeline? Yes. Good question.
00:10:57
Speaker
um The short answer is actually back to the the question you first asked, which is for people to look when we first chatting, it was people talk about hydrogen, but then ammonia doesn't really get a get a mention as much. And I think the realization slowly dawning in the hydrogen economy is it's a bit more for practical use cases, like the ammonia economy. So we were going to use hydrogen to power automotive, you know, if you go back 10 years, five years, we're going to use hydrogen for lots of different applications.
00:11:29
Speaker
We're going to use it for fuel cells in ah vehicles. We're going to use it for lots of maybe heating homes as well as talked about. And there are lots of these kind of use cases in automotive and mobility and in then people start dealing with hydrogen. And hydrogen is quite difficult to deal with ah from a practical level.
00:11:49
Speaker
or is i as in because it's Why? difficult Because hydrogen requires ah cryogenic temperatures or incredibly high pressure. So the cryogenic temperatures for for context minus 253 degrees centigrade. That's colder than anywhere in our solar system.
00:12:04
Speaker
and the pressures up to 700 bar pressure that's only found at the very bottom of our oceans. And all of that costs money. So hydrogen is great if you want to use it straight out of the gates, but if you then need to hang on to it in any way, shape or form, it becomes dangerous. it In bristles, pipes, it tends to leak a lot as well. um And unlike ammonia, you can't smell it. You don't know what's happening. And so it all becomes a bit tricky in the real world application. So we've deployed a lot of capital into hydrogen. There's a lot of renewable energy that's been turned into hydrogen.
00:12:33
Speaker
And then it's okay what's the use case for that hydrogen and we argue at neam that the hydrogen economy is a bit more like the ammonia economy and in that world what we should do the best use for the hydrogen we've got and that's clean is to replace the gray stuff that we're already using.
00:12:50
Speaker
So that goes into the ammonia and we enable at small scale with flexibility and the ability to scale up fast. That transition, the Harbor Bosch process traditionally doesn't allow for that because you you need a lot of energy, so much energy that renewables can't, it doesn't make sense to do it for renewables. Because our nano catalyst requires less energy, ah we we enable um We enable kind of renewable energy to enter the fray when it comes to to to ammonia production, which didn't really exist before. So you can electrify Halberbosch, but it's energy intensive. um So yeah, we think about it in terms of, um ah to back to your original question, what is our market? We've seen our inbound. We didn't believe this at the beginning. We didn't think this would be the case. We thought, well, ammonia, it's going to be farms, right?
00:13:38
Speaker
But we do have, of our pipeline, we do have a lot of interest from agricultural companies wanting to decarbonize and looking at it from that angle. But the majority of our pipeline is actually energy companies who are making renewable energy. They might have solar assets, wind assets. And then they have, um they want, either they either they already have offtake agreed in some cases that they have ammonia companies who are interested or chemical companies who are interested.
00:14:06
Speaker
And then they have energy that they want to turn into hydrogen and use somewhere else. So they already have hydrogen assets deployed um and they already have electrolyzers installed. The use cases they were going to have ah perhaps for fuel cells and other things aren't there anymore.
00:14:21
Speaker
But ammonia is not going anywhere. We're relying on it for our food. So those are the use cases we focus on. So it's easy for us as a business model. It's relatively straightforward because um while we rely on our technology and we double down on that, the off-takers, in most most cases, agree there's ah fertilizer companies on one side. And on the other side, you've got renewable energy companies who are turning that renewable energy into hydrogen in in some cases. And they would love to have a small scale ammonia use case that then can scale up fast to meet demand.
00:14:52
Speaker
Um, an offtake, um, for our listeners offtake is it is an agreement, uh, for purchasing your product. Um, even though ah before you're actually making it that is that description.
00:15:06
Speaker
yeah basically Yeah, it's an agreement to ah it's agreement to confirm that it's worth making that product. so um like okay so this is how this is one way to you know if you're If you're going to build a high-cap-ex, complex, physical plant or or product,
00:15:24
Speaker
You need to be sure that it's worth putting hundreds of millions of dollars into building that thing. And offtake agreements are a way to have evidence that when you've spent hundreds of millions of dollars and built the thing, someone is going to buy the produce.
00:15:37
Speaker
Right. And in in your language there is that there's a kind of hint for us as well, because we personally, or Nehem, I thought me personally, we personally as the company have 57 million in off-site agreements ourselves from um ah chemical, agricultural, mining companies.
00:15:54
Speaker
And that's useful to demonstrate to some of our partners who we we speak with on the renewable energy side who are making the clean hydrogen and looking for a use case. We can say, look, if if you if you don't have a local offtake agreed yourselves, we can do it and we can take it. Unfortunately, ammonia has a mature infrastructure. We've been relying on it for 100 years for our food. So we can shift ammonia around. It's very similar conditions to propane. So we know how to move ammonia around. Hydrogen doesn't have that. There is no infrastructure. There is no way to ship hydrogen at scale around the world. So that's interesting. And in the beginning, that's where we start, right? We're going to decarbonize fertilizer, and we're going to use this as products a way to replace gray products with green ah in the ammonia world as is.
00:16:42
Speaker
But then you have the case of, all right, if you're able to then plug into global infrastructure and start moving hydrogen energy, ah renewable energy around as hydrogen turned into ammonia, and if that's going to be done effectively, then some people are interested in one day having ah energy from the global south shipped to the global north, and then As I mentioned, you can burn ammonia without carbon emissions. So that's very early stage stuff, but it allows us to start thinking about what a world without fossil fuels looks like. The most traded commodity in the world today is oil, and the most energy-dense carbon-free molecule we have is ammonia. So there is ah but but at the moment, we focus on the agriculture, really the the existing market for ammonia, and that's where we start small, scale up fast, and that's where we're at at the moment, yeah.
00:17:36
Speaker
ah final A final comment before I move on to my next question is I think also we haven't made it clear enough that when we think of renewable energy or we think of massive nuclear plants, we think of coal fired plants, clients
Adoption and Industry Engagement
00:17:49
Speaker
ah we think of these huge factories making hydrogen or ammonia. Actually, what's so exciting about what you're doing is your catalysts are like, what, the size of a car or something?
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, so we're tiny. ah And that's a good thing in this world. So, yeah, earlier and your in your question, you said, yeah, for offtake agreements, for example, the reason we'd be able to secure 57 million in offtakes and this kind of big pipeline of pilot projects is because of the scale of what we're doing. We're very small. And so there isn't hundreds of millions of capex for what we do.
00:18:24
Speaker
It's more like millions, right? so So it allows you to have a much smaller scale entry point. If you want to build a Harbor Bosch plant, that will be a billion, please. but that's the that's That's the scale. So it really is incredibly expensive to build these plants. So we operate a much, much smaller scale and that allows for this flexibility and it lets industry gives them an opportunity that they've never had before, which is this flexible, scalable version of ammonia production, whereas previously it was very heavy duty capex.
00:18:50
Speaker
and you happen to need a hell of a lot of fossil fuels around you if you wanted to make it work. By dropping the heat and pressure on the catalyst, we then enable for ah clean hydrogen to come into play.
00:19:02
Speaker
And you also don't need to power the whole process with fossil fuels as well. ah You need less power overall. So yeah, it's worth clearing that bit up as well. We're very, very small. yeah That's the point. But we can scale up, and we're dealing with industry partners about that. OK, what does this catalyst look like at the mega so and mega plant scale as well? Is there a way to retrofit or replace? And the answer is, yeah, maybe. We don't know. We haven't gone up to that scale yet. ah But it's interesting to think about how we could help decarbonize in that in that aspect too.
00:19:31
Speaker
Building that pipeline, talking to these industry players. can you can you ah What's been a ah ah lesson that you've learned talking to these guys? Either something that you realize now you shouldn't have done or, oh, thank God we thought to do that at the time.
00:19:53
Speaker
ah The Dunning-Kruger effect is very real ah in in ah in company contexts as well as individual contexts. So Dunning-Kruger for context is this, I'm going to butcher it a bit, but basically it was a a study run by Dunning and Kruger and they were looking at, I think, IQ and a couple of other metrics, which is people always overestimate their own ability and when told what the average is. and And I think that's true in companies as well, where if you listen to your own, drink your own Kool-Aid too much, you start to kid yourselves about how good you are.
00:20:24
Speaker
so um on that and how we did that was we just went out to market and we listened more than we talked ah and we started out standing in a field with a farmer in one of the biggest family-run farms in the UK and we were talking to him about doing ammonia on his site and then we said okay if we're going to do ammonia here it's very early days for us we were like right we're going to do yeah install a reactor here and before we worked out the unit economics and everything else, we were like, right, this is how it's going to be. And then we went for, right, well, I'm we need hydrogen then. And so I went on online on LinkedIn in my naivety, this is right the beginning of our journey. And I messaged a guy, a very big energy company who only was making hydrogen and said, Hello, mate, can I buy some hydrogen off you? And he's like, Yeah, no, that's totally not how this works. um However, why don't you come in, come up to London?
00:21:15
Speaker
So we came out to London and they had a very big flashy office and they were all wearing very nice suits. And we went went in and sat down with them and had a chat and we taught them through what we were doing. And at the end we were like, so could we buy some hydrogen? And they were like, yeah, we'd kind of like to invest. And we were like, oh, so Phil and I, my co-founder, went for a beer afterwards and we were like, that was weird. We went in there trying to buy hydrogen and then we came out and they were trying to buy us.
00:21:42
Speaker
And so you know did did day the arrogant way of so speaking about it is because we were good, but actually it's because we were told by the market. And that led us to say the the agricultural problem is a huge one and we have to decarbonize agriculture, but hydrogen has a real problem.
00:22:00
Speaker
a problem that they need solving yesterday, which is anyone who's deployed money in the hydrogen knows this is it's very difficult to hang on to that hydrogen. Your product is a headache. As soon as you make it, you've got this very explosive gas on site, which is very expensive to hang on to. So you need it gone. And the best way to do it is to have a is to turn it into existing markets, an existing market and and use that to decarbonize at the same time.
00:22:26
Speaker
So that's how we how how we ended up with this business model. is We pivoted basically. We changed what we were doing and listened more and more to the market. So now we have offtake agreements with yeah some of the big agricultural companies, but we have partnerships planned with some of the big, big energy companies. And that is really useful to us. It helps us in terms of we're not you know we're not project developers or big engineers.
00:22:48
Speaker
But we do have engineers on our side, so we can do the smaller scale version. And then our partners in renewable energy hydrogen companies, they can help us with the next part of scale while we give them a kind of low barrier to entry to a very, very big market. OK. I'm going to switch directions. Of course. how we've We've just spoken a lot about a lot of money, but how much
00:23:15
Speaker
how what You're not doing this for the money. I know i know this about you about you, Lewis. You're not doing this for the money. No, you're wrong. Of course I'm doing it for money. No, I'm kidding. Obviously, like... Just a little bit of money. i don't do from my i do i mean I do get paid by Niamh, so let's be clear about that. And I'm not a completely deluded hippie. I do get that we don't get to capture or credit or offset or invent our way out of the climate crisis. I do understand that um
00:23:46
Speaker
I do believe, I've run charities, I've done a not-for-profit and I've worked at different types of organizations before as well. And I do believe that a venture-backed business is the best way to deal with climate because they can move very quickly. And we've demonstrated that at NEEM, the ability to move very fast and to and to to mobilize capital on people very quickly. And so when I think about NEEM and what we're doing, I think more about in terms of um like actual emergency and a bit like war, where it's like, okay, but you yet need to use the best resources at your disposal in order to meet a challenge. And I believe that if you look at it over the right timeframes, we as a company have a fiduciary and an ethical responsibility, but over the right timeframes, those are both met. So what I'm saying is that when capture and offsets and cop 50,000 or whatever it is this time where we still haven't been able to achieve anything,
00:24:41
Speaker
really in terms of climate or all kind of fall by the wayside, people start looking long and hard at actually how are we going to really properly start decarbonizing. And the best way in my book to do that is to stop putting emissions in the atmosphere in the first place. And so that's where the nano catalyst comes in. And that's what our business model is designed around. We exist as a company. Our mission is to eliminate emissions.
00:25:06
Speaker
And we started, obviously, with the most polluting chemical industrial process on our planet. So, yeah, you're right. it's I mean, you know, I exited a company a while ago and I did OK on that one. And um I have a nice life and on and all of that. But I also have a daughter who's ah just about eight months old. And I want to be able to look her in the eye when I'm older and say I did my best and that our generation did our best. so Yes, that is why I'm into it. And I think that's why we have had support from governments and the BMW Foundation and so many other people as well. Like if we were just some we're going to be the competition company, I think that's slightly different. But we're we're like a climate company that wants to leave a better planet for future generations. And that means different things for different
Cost and Emission Reductions
00:25:52
Speaker
people. But ultimately, they can see where we're coming from and they understand the context.
00:25:56
Speaker
How did you go about actually getting robust figures though, robust evidence for the potential of your impact, even from the beginning and what kind of work would you have to do now to have evidence and a credible claim for, okay, we're going to have this impact on decarbonizing emissions, which I think is your main area of the impact. It would be the decarbonization part. Yeah, good question. we We look at it for a number. I mean, ultimately,
00:26:27
Speaker
Right at the core of ammonia production is is people look at the levelized cost, right which is the levelized cost of ammonia. So you take your capex, your opex, and you say, how basically, how cheap can you make ammonia?
00:26:38
Speaker
um and Because of our lower energy requirements, we we can believe that we can bring that levelized cost down while still using a clean hydrogen product. So um the trouble with electrifying half of washes, that you can make it, you can make clean ammonia, but it's very, very expensive. The levelized cost goes through the roof because of the energy requirements like for you for using clean energy to to power it.
00:27:04
Speaker
um So at NEEM, we look at it through that lens at the core for for ammonia synthesis, which is with less energy requirements and the benefits of not having to compress fossil-fueled hydrogen and other benefits to come along with that. We can get down to a level low-levelized cost, but we can also start hunting wherever the cheapest clean ammonia is. So wherever the cheapest clean hydrogen is, we can make the clean ammonia.
00:27:29
Speaker
So this is why we've got a project running in Spain. We've got one running in north Australia as well, which is where they have a lot of ah of abundant renewable energy. That means cheap, relatively cheap hydrogen, clean hydrogen. And then we can make cheap, clean ammonia from that. so so So that's one metric that we look at, the levelized cost of ammonia. And then the other one ah more on the emissions side is is our emissions control. And it's how we model everything we do. So emissions control is simply by deploying our technologies in different contexts at different scales, how much ah how many emissions can we eliminate? How many emissions can we stop going into the atmosphere? ah So for every ton of ammonia that's made today, two tons of CO2 goes into the atmosphere. So we are down at 0.08 for ours, on our catalyst. Now, of course, we're at much smaller scale than those massive harbor Bosch plants. So right now, we're we're more costly. But
00:28:24
Speaker
over time and with economies of scale that we'll get scaling up, we believe that we can get down to that to a low levelized cost while at the same time having that huge emissions impact as well. um But it is a challenge, like, you know, everyone wants it cheap, and if everyone wants it green. And that is a tightrope that you have to walk. Fortunately, the low energy demands, the low pressure demands primarily for us mean that we are able to start demonstrating quite good economies straight out the gate, which has been useful for us.
00:28:55
Speaker
um ah Exactly. Just to reiterate what you've already said, it's is the smaller scale, it's the decentralization, it's the lower capex to even get started. You've gone from a billion to a couple of million or however much it is to get started. Right, I think we we also, I just want to add this, because there might be but other people on carbon 13 listening to this maybe, what we made a bit bit of a mistake, and this is again a bit done in Kruger, it's a bit echo chamber, right, which is like, I care deeply about climate, there's nothing and that's more important to me, it's yeah i was the only game of town for me, right, that that's it, I'm all in on climate.
00:29:31
Speaker
But the real world, like the the world of business doesn't care that much. Like if we cared more, we would have done more by now. What they care about is money. Like what we care about as a world is money. We're a capitalist society and that is what is the problem. ah But could also be the solution if we get it right with venture.
00:29:47
Speaker
But what we didn't underline for people early on when we were talking about our company, we said, yeah, like, k clean ammonia on demand. And we talked a lot about that. We didn't demonstrate what industry actually wants to know about it, which is more interesting, was that it's flexible, it's scalable, and it's cost effective. And those things hit home a lot more. So sometimes it's just worth taking a step back and saying, like, we all care deeply about a climate, but industry doesn't really care about that. What industry cares about is, can you do this cost effectively? Is it flexible? Does it help help solve my existing headaches, like the inflexibility of half a Bosch, like the fact that it doesn't scale down at all already. And the fact that you know we could we we want to make a clean product, but we need it to be cost effective. So when we realized that that's actually what people care about a bit more, we started focusing on that. And that got us further with our partnerships. And and now we have some great people on the table who um
00:30:40
Speaker
who understand the mission but also you know want to make money while they're doing it.
Team Dynamics and Motivation
00:30:46
Speaker
ah Talking of people on the table, um you met your co-founders on the Carbon 13 Venture Builder. ah What's it like going on this journey with them?
00:30:56
Speaker
um Emotional, ah lovely, um And I think we we've all grown a lot through the program and beyond, like I'm through this company over the last two and a half years years it is now. I'm the mouth obviously, that's why I'm on the podcast. ah Phil feel was the hands, he's like an engineer, so he's a former race car engineer. He used to work on Michael Schumacher's cars.
00:31:24
Speaker
And Doc's UBL knew who is the brains of the operation. And he while I am here rabbiting away about hydrogen hydrogen and p ammonia and and you know our company in general, he's actually the inventor of the technology and the reason why we're all here. it's It's a brilliant breakthrough and we're very excited about it. The King made a film about us recently as well. It's really in the show notes as well. So King Charles ah commissioned the Sustainable Markets Initiative and they made a documentary about what we're doing as well.
00:31:52
Speaker
So it's been a wild ride and we really enjoyed it. I enjoy working with them and I particularly enjoy working with two guys who are interested, very different, right? So or our ways of approaching things, I should say, are very different. So I'm more kind of, yeah, words, commercial guy. I've done startups and entrepreneur, fills the engineer and UBL as a scientist. So we have each area covered and we built the team around that triangle, which has worked very well for us.
00:32:17
Speaker
um And it means that we challenge each other's assumptions and challenge each other to do better all the time as well. So that's good. And we still have a laugh while doing it, which is critical because ah we spend a lot of time to go in.
00:32:30
Speaker
No, that is actually important. yeah And also I just love the imagery of the King just stood there with his iPhone floating. It's exactly like that. He was just like selfie guys and we were in there. No, it was an ah incredibly good camera crew, obviously, and all the bells and whistles that came along with it. Maybe we could put it in the show notes to show people because it's great. It's quite cool. It's great to be part of it.
00:32:51
Speaker
And that led us to suddenly being kind of people from all around the world approaching, which I think also helped with the off takes and the other kind of commercial traction we started to get there. Absolutely. You know, Lewis, whenever I'm talking to you, I just think, wow,
00:33:06
Speaker
I sum you up with persistence. Where do you think your persistence has come from? Did you always have it or has it been forged by all of those startups and charities? Bloody relentless is is maybe what my missus would say. ah Yeah, I'm a bit obsessive, it's weird. I mean, this all came from I was doing a not-for-profit working with kids. I set it up myself after I exited the company and did pretty well on it. And I was like, right, what am I gonna do now? And I was like, I'm gonna try and do good in this very kind of ah naive way. So then I set up this not-for-profit working with schools. I was running so school trips and helping young people deal with climate change, essentially, by talking about climate curriculum and careers in the climate change world. Never really made any money, but it did,
00:33:55
Speaker
give me this kind of insight into, oh, the climate crisis is also a bit of a mental health crisis. And this is what young people are going through as they realize that adults have kind of sold them short on a future. And then so I was running these skill trips to kind of show these kids these different examples of like, look hey, there are companies in this space. I went to a shout out to Sustainable Ventures because they let me in and show you all of the wonderful ventures that they were working with there. I'd say, look, there are people actually working on this problem. And we believe, too, that these are going to be ah the unicorns of the future. This is where you're going to generate real value over time. Is is companies in this space that are dealing with this problem head on? You haven't been so short. There are people out there who care. So um I did that for a while. And then one day,
00:34:39
Speaker
Just before COVID hit, and I had to shut down the company along with all the schools that closed down, a kid said to me, look, mate, we don't really need you to make us feel better about climate change. You need to go out and do something about it. And I was like, oh, shit. Oh, I was swollen on the podcast, sorry. But yeah, I was like, oh. Well, I mean, you're gonna have to bleep that out. But I was like, wow, oh god that kid is right. You know, we talk and we bleep and we go to these conferences and we slap each other's backs and say, yeah, let's set another target. But like, nah, we need to do something. And that means hard science, hard tech.
00:35:12
Speaker
It does mean significant investment upfront, but it also means huge payoffs if you can actually demonstrate real emissions reduction. So if I'm persistent, it's because that kid basically told me what my job should be when we were kind of kidding ourselves with this, let's talk about it, we're all going to feel better. um And then so I'm like, right, this is a fight worth fight fight worth having. And then I'm like,
00:35:32
Speaker
just watching how other people have become activated and engaged. We run a project called The Planeteers, which we have wonderful people working for us. And that was just simply a call out saying, here's what we're doing. Tell us how you can help. You can tell us what you should be paid. You can tell us where you're going to work, because that's what your hours are going to be. Just tell us how you're going to help. And that has generated loads of applications. And we've got brilliant people who still work with us for us to this day because of that. so Yeah, if I'm persistent, it's because it's the only game in town and I get up earlier with more energy in my step because of because of that. And I know what corporate world looks like and I know what other jobs are like. you know i've done' I'm old enough and ugly enough to understand all of that.
Call to Action for Climate Solutions
00:36:16
Speaker
But this one was like, this is definitely um something that I can dedicate a significant portion of my life to and um yeah be proud of it by the end, hopefully.
00:36:27
Speaker
Absolutely. And that encapsulates the spirit of the kind of founder we want to work with at Carbon 13. We describe it as a doing program, not a talking program. ah You know, venture is one pillar of how we're going to solve the climate emergency. It's not the only pillar, but it's a way to actually get start doing something at speed, even if it's not perfect, but you need it needs to be done is better than perfect, right?
00:36:53
Speaker
I'm going to have to challenge you, Sarah. You said not perfect, but at Liam we always go for perfect. No, no no that's not true. We're totally imperfect and that makes us even better. We're learning all the time and it and it is that spirit of saying, okay, this is different. We are not here to simply beat the competition. We are here for a much bigger purpose.
00:37:11
Speaker
And that that that means that we have tried to be less ego driven, more honest with ourselves, less hierarchical and more open to new ideas. And I think that actually we learned that a lot from carbon-13 as well. that the that whatever God is here is not going to get us there. So there's new models of thinking and approaching the problems that you face is to come up at work. So that's been lovely as well. And I've enjoyed that aspect of it where it's broadened my horizons and helped me understand that this is about far more than just um you know rehashing an old playbook. So if you had if you could sum up one call to action, how would you sum it up? Call to action for who?
00:37:56
Speaker
Whoever is listening to this podcast. Oh wow, okay. Are you ready guys? Are you listening? Pay attention. Slow it down to one speed. Yeah, I think...
00:38:10
Speaker
The secret of the change is not on fighting the old, but building the new. I think we spend a lot of time bickering about um the red team or the blue team in political circles or um whether this was the right approach or that was the right approach historically.
00:38:27
Speaker
and And that that that means that we're we're kind of ego driven and start to take pick teams and start pointing fingers. But I don't see that as a particularly productive way of moving forward. um And I don't think we are that different actually when it boils down to it.
00:38:46
Speaker
And I think that climate is a lovely way of of kind of demonstrating that is that it doesn't really matter what lines you draw on the map. ah They are totally artificial and they don't exist in the real world. So yeah, so so I think that it's just that this kind of vision of the future that actually can be positive because ultimately, on the one hand, yes, climate the climate crisis has been caused by our relentless pursuit of growth and capitalism overall.
00:39:15
Speaker
But it also isn't really a world that's made us that happy. And so I believe that not only is there ah a version of a kind of so more toned down sensitive, if if I use that word, capitalism in the future, but also one where we can be a bit more happy and work better as companies. And you see examples of that with the B Corp movement, with Patagonia.
00:39:36
Speaker
Other companies that have actually gone that Ben and Jerry's another example, they go that extra mile. They they take more risk. They don't have these rigid infrastructure and rules, but they tend to do a lot better as well. And that for me is very interesting. It's thought okay. Maybe we just evolve.
00:39:53
Speaker
ah Maybe we just we can price in externalities because we're we're that good. And that's the type of business that we're building at Nehem, and that's that's something. So sorry, that was not one sentence. the The one sentence is, the secret with change is not on fighting the old, it's building the new. Of course, that's not mine. I stole that. ah But I think it's a very good line, and I think it's something that in the context of climate is worth thinking about. Who did you steal it from?
00:40:18
Speaker
It is wrongfully attributed to Socrates. It is a character from a book who is called Socrates. A former Olympian wrote the book. I can't remember his name. ah But yeah, so so it's a good one in terms of just thinking about the future rather than getting too stuck in the past. Thank you so much, Lewis, for ah sharing all of that wisdom and that knowledge. I think we've had knowledge and wisdom ah in this podcast.
00:40:48
Speaker
I don't know about that, but I have to answer your questions. so And I just want to shout out to the NEM team who are ridiculously good and just make me happy every day by their brilliance. So I want to say thank you to those a lot because they're excellent, all of them. They really are. is it's it's It's a great team. It's very strange when you have a public face on it, when you work within a company. And obviously there are some faces which are more public than others. um But sometimes it's the people who are working behind the scenes who are Who are the MVP's but anyway, right? I'm like the sickest least good-looking person in the whole team as well So it's like God's why the monkey at the front? No, but like you know We need that because
00:41:33
Speaker
You need the inventors, you need UBL, right? You desperately need that. But you also need the person who can walk into an energy office in London and somehow walk away with an investment offer. Yes, that's true, that's true, that's helpful. And also, we don't want to distract UBL like those like these people. So it's better that I do this because you know, they don't let me near the lab most of the time, so that's good.
00:41:57
Speaker
Thank you so much, Lewis. Um, I want to say thank you to everybody listening, whether you're a founder, whether you're an investor, whether you're somebody who's just curious about this space, but new to the space. I hope you've got something to take away with you. You're also very welcome to reach out to carbon 13. We're always very happy to have a chat. It's a community. It's an open door community. I think from today we've learned that climate takes persistence.
00:42:25
Speaker
Climate takes money, climate takes ammonia, but ultimately climate is going to take you. Thank you for listening.