#222 Exposing the O&G Carbon Capture Lie & How Skytree is Doing it Right w/ Rob van Straten, CEO)

Hear the CEO of Skytree explain how you MUST build for scale to achieve impact in a timely manner -- how O&G have been releasing their captured Co2 for years -- why their biggest investor is a huge Greenhouse Operator -- the importance of co-locating your carbon capture tech with the demand -- his journey into climate -- and a few more hot takes. 

Listen Time: Full Show 57:04 (no ads) | Free Preview 41:09

On today’s episode, Rob van Straten, the CEO of Skytree captures our attention with his deep wisdom on how to scale a successful carbon capture technology company. 

Why you should trust him? He brings a long career of experience building and scaling companies that he parlayed into Skytree where they are currently crushing it with their modular, mass-production capable carbon capture system. 

Spoiler alert, you can’t do this successfully if you’re doing it on a project basis - you need to do it with a modular system that you can mass produce (it allows for faster iteration of the design). 

Learn:
**How they build their team culture and value young talents
**How Oil & Gas has been catching and releasing carbon for years and how Skytree is now actually solving this problem — also related, why their largest investor is the largest owner/operator of greenhouses in the Netherlands
**Why you MUST set out to achieve scale from day one.

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Topics
**00:00 Intro
**03:03 Rob’s Journey Into Climate
**05:57 Mentorship & the Next Gen of Entrepreneurs
**09:05 Skytree's Origin and Technology Overview
**15:09 The Future of Carbon Capture: Machines vs. Plants
**28:30 Innovative Approaches to Carbon Capture
**32:45 How They Partner with Greenhouses
**38:23 Scaling Up: Lessons from the Solar Industry
**41:35 Collaboration with Large Emitters
**45:50 The Future of Oil and Energy Transition
**48:03 The Carbon Capture Startup Landscape

Links
**Rob van Straten | Skytree
**Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn
**Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn

This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 3:03 Rob’s Journey Into Climate
• 5:57 Mentorship & the Next Gen of Entrepreneurs
• 9:05 Skytree's Origin and Technology Overview
• 15:09 The Future of Carbon Capture: Machines vs. Plants
• 28:30 Innovative Approaches to Carbon Capture
• 32:45 How They Partner with Greenhouses
• 38:23 Scaling Up: Lessons from the Solar Industry

Transcript

CleanTechies (00:00)
You can put a machine at the location where you need CO2. You can disrupt the current fossil fuel based supply chain where CO2 is captured in fossil fuel industries, fertilizer plants, oil refineries, steel companies. So we inherently had the plan to scale up to large volumes when we started this journey. And even if that would happen, let's say tonight and all emissions will be stopped, then still we've got it.

too much CO2 levels in the atmosphere, then still our climate will head for disaster. So, you know, we need solutions anyway. Welcome back to Clean Techies, the number one podcast for climate tech entrepreneurs. I'm Somil. And I'm Silas. Each week we publish the secrets to success from investors, founders, operators, and experts in climate tech around the world. Building a startup is hard. Building a climate tech startup is even harder, but we make it a little bit easier. We put a lot of effort into these shows, so we hope you enjoy.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and let us know who you think we should have on next. With that, let's get into today's episode.

If you're hearing this now, it's because you are a paid subscriber to Clean Techies. Thank you so much for supporting our mission. Enjoy this ad-free listening experience. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Clean Techies podcast. Silas here today with you. Today, we get to have a conversation with Rob VanStraten, the CEO of Skytree. They are a developer of sorbent-based modular carbon capture technology. They are, if I'm not mistaken, the leading carbon capture technology.

And they have reached TRL 9 for a small modular system. So in terms of deployment and just kind of technology wise, that's why I understand them to be the furthest along. If I'm incorrect on that, feel free to reach out and correct me. We'll make sure we rewrite the system there. But they make systems that can be manufactured at scale and then stacked kind of like Legos to scale up for whatever job you need to be done. After a long career, Rob ended up taking this job as CEO at Skytree. And after hearing his

this interview with him, you'll probably understand why he's really a solid person for the job. In today's conversation, we discussed quite a lot of things. I would say perhaps the most interesting topics to to point out to you are why their largest investor is also the largest owner of greenhouses in the Netherlands. There's a quite interesting story behind that. And part of that leads to the second topic, which is his take on why oil and gas capturing carbon has not been circular because they were selling it to greenhouses in the past. So they weren't actually capturing carbon at the net.

They were selling it to greenhouses and it was going back into the air. So he has a whole kind of discussion point that we go into. He also talks about his kind of maybe perhaps controversial pragmatic view that will never fully go away from oil, at least not as soon as we hope. And finally, he talks a little bit about how project-based carbon capture companies are doing it wrong. So if you're developing on a per project basis rather than with a modular technology, he has a very strong stance that you are doing it wrong.

And in particular, it's really focused on why scalable production is the key to driving down those costs. So, you know, there's plenty of really good topics that we get into. I'll leave you here with the teasers. Let's get into the conversation with Rob. All right. Welcome to the show, Rob. How are you doing today? I'm very well. Thank you, Silas. Nice to be here. Yeah, we're really excited to get you on. think we've had to reschedule this a few times, so glad to finally make it happen. This is going to be an exciting one. So I guess to start us off.

Give us, who is one clean techie or one climate tech OG that you would love to have dinner with and why? Wow. I would think that that would be with Ruben actually. He is the CEO of a Dutch company called COCO2, S-E-A-O2. So he's doing something similar as we are doing, but then capturing CO2 from the ocean. And I'm really fascinated by...

how professional, how quickly and, you know, and how much with how much quality he's building that startup. just read this morning that he closed a seed round of 2 million euro and I was presenting together with him or next after each other at the climate tech summit last week in Amsterdam. And I was super impressed by his presentation, by his personality. So I wish I was that, you know,

that good at that age. think he's mid thirties. Yeah. So he's, really sort of my, younger brother, so to speak. And I think our company should merge and he should become the CEO somewhere. Not tomorrow. Right. You still want to do that. Right. Very good. Well, I appreciate that. That's a nice one. like to hear that. So I guess, you know, for, people, you, you've got a long career before getting into climate tech, you know, you, you kind of just alluded to it. You started in technology. did a different, a lot of different work in cybersecurity and then eventually kind of worked your way into, to climate. So.

You know, how did this journey kind of transpire? Give us the quick summary. Well, it was all coincidence. So nothing was planned. And Skytree, I was asked for while I was actually building down this crazy life of long working days and travel. But, you know, I've always been entrepreneurial by character, by DNA. It really didn't really matter if I worked as an employee, manager employee at a larger company.

or build our own company as I usually do that with others. For me, it wasn't really a difference. It was always building businesses and I'm attracted to growth markets and preferably with uncharted territory. So markets that hardly exist or in transition grow fast and that apparently that is where I'm always attracted to. you know, all these steps on the path of my life.

usually brought me into that environment and that can't be a coincidence, right? Yeah. And then how did you specifically decide this most recently to kind of work in the climate? think I'd be really curious to be able to tell that part of your story. Like why you decided this is what matters to me now. Obviously it is a growing market. You already alluded to that, but what specifically kind of on a personal level led you to this? Yeah. So I started to work in a broader ESG domain. What is it like 14 years ago or so?

more on the compliance and ethics side with software that facilitates ESG processes in large companies and educating people around themes like anti-bribery or modern slavery or dealing with government or, you know, all these say compliance and ethics type topics. So the business unit that I was responsible for educated many, many millions of workers across the globe.

on those ethical and compliance topics. And then the other side was to implement enterprise platforms to manage that whole ESG landscape. That was actually the first time that another dimension was added to the work I was doing, which was, you know, like numbers and profit.

usual things. So that was my first experience. And then I was asked to join EVBox at the time, leading manufacturer of EV charging, both for residential as well as professional as well as high power chargers. There I did a combination of hardware and climate tech because, you know, electrification of transport is an important item when it comes down to combating climate change.

And that combination of hardware and climate tech is exactly what I'm doing at Skytree now. And there's a lot of similarities between the business of chargers and direct air capture machines as we produce. And it's not a surprise. mean, I had now five people from former EVMocks, you know, because it's easy. There's so much similarity. And, you know, it's, I think it's a story that, that, that you might hear more often. I always had.

cool jobs and sometimes I a lot of money, sometimes not so much. But actually my stories were a bit boring, right? Until I started to do something that really has impact. And now certainly at Skytree, where there's such a direct impact you can have in reduction of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, know, my kids think I'm doing something cool there.

21, 25 and 27. actually my daughter of 21, she's coming to Skytree tomorrow to come and look around and have dinner with me on the campus thereafter. So it helped me to become a cool dad. Exactly. Yeah. That's got to be pretty rewarding as well. I mean, this is something I want to talk to you about a little bit because you're alluding to it that you've got a longer career and that you've now gone into working climate with all of this experience you bring with you.

before we move on, because I want to talk a little bit about mentorship. So you've been in the space for a while and you have many lessons, right? Probably even many more do's and don'ts within just generally building companies and in your career in general. So I guess, how do you view mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs given that you have experience? And a lot of people usually become entrepreneurs young. If they have a win, they oftentimes kind of sit on the sidelines, know, chilling at a beach or whatever. So any thoughts about mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs?

Well, thank you for asking that question. That is something I really enjoy doing. Only since maybe since four or five years that I really started to, you know, to think about these things before it was more like natural. And I started to actually mentor a group of young managers at EVBox. And I kept on mentoring them after we both went our own way. Just because, you know, I really enjoy doing it.

You get so much back from transferring experience and insights that are difficult to learn if you didn't experience them yourself. So I really enjoyed that mentoring and then I applied a way of working with young, talented people in Skytree even further than mentoring. And that is to take younger people extremely serious and not think that people can't do that just because they didn't do it before. And in Skytree, you will be surprised.

how many people below 30 are in leading positions. I'm almost the exception, you know, with experience. So I value talent over experience. As experience, you can get from people like me and your surroundings. Talent, you have talent and mindset and DNA. That's what you have. So I really enjoy putting my experience to use.

And I also really enjoy putting young people that have the capabilities and the willingness to put young people in the lead. So we have people that come straight from university and after a year, they are a team leader and they have more experienced people reporting to them in a very natural way. This is quite a common practice within Skytree. When you talk about having talent that's kind of like a mentality that's there, you can't exactly train that, right? You're suggesting that experience.

can be brought to the table by people who have the experience, but there's a certain mentality that you need. What are those core pieces of that mentality that you would point out that you look for when you're hiring? So I would say the ability to be focused on objectives, on North Stars, on something that you want to reach, that you want to deliver, so that you have the willingness, the capabilities to climb the mountain.

And every day, you know, put steps before you and keep climbing. And then the goals differ. It depends on the role you're in, but that determination, then obviously also having like the other elements that you need in your character, like being able to work with people, get to bring across ideas, inspire your team members. And that goes all without saying that's what every manager needs in his or her toolbox. But what really sets people apart.

as exceptional talents is that determination and focus on achieving something, reaching a goal. And then, you know, if there's roadblocks, then you remove the roadblocks or you look for help to remove the roadblocks. But the roadblock, you know, is something you will remove. It's not there to stop you. Right. I don't know if that makes any sense. Yeah. Yeah. The ability to not get hung up on something, right? If an obstacle comes in your way, you find a way to either go around or

Yeah. So this is the last thing I want to talk about on this section is, you have all this experience, like other people, I mentioned earlier, they sit on the sidelines after they have a lot of wins. They've got enough money to sit back and retire. But in climate, we've got this issue facing all of us. So do you have any macro thoughts on other people who have, let's say, been in the arena for a long time, they've built and sold many companies or...

you maybe they haven't even been always successful, but they have that experience. What do you say to people like that to try to get them into climate, you know, even though they're, let's call it at the later end of their career. So what I experienced around me is that there are a lot of these people that you described that get into climate tech. People like me, there are more, you know, people that are experienced and are at the ultimate of their career. Actually, there are a lot.

of senior people working at Skytree that took a haircut that were midst or end second half of their career. So I definitely am not alone. There's a lot of people around me and not only in the Netherlands. I met a lot of people in the U.S. that have similar behavior. I would like to call out Damien Steele, the CEO of Deep Sky. He's one of the examples.

of a great leader who was super successful in the capital markets, run a capital firm, and then decided to become CEO of a carbon removal company. And I don't know what his paycheck is or what it was, but I'm sure it's substantially lower. And I work with him, I know him personally, but also when I look at the early days of Skytree after I joined two and a years ago.

We weren't ready to get capital from the capital markets and we didn't have cash. We wanted to grow. We were super ambitious. So we went to banks. They put us in contact with wealthy individuals and those were all people that sold their company and that made themselves known at the bank. know, I want to become a private investor. That's where we got the first generation of investors. All people that were either retired or were close to retirement were in senior positions and said, well,

I'll contribute. I like the idea. It's great what you're doing, Rob. Some of them are in our strategy board. So I see a lot of similar motivation around me, people that put their experience to work and then not put, let's say, financial gains, number one, but what can I contribute at number one?

I like that. guess maybe I'm a little too negative on the people who aren't back in the arena, but as long as they're putting their capital to work, they're still doing the work in another way, right? Because you need both to make the world go round. So let's dive into, tell us the of the origin story and the building story of Skytree. What's the history there? Skytree was founded over a decade ago as spin-off of the European Space Agency.

There was something called a CO2 scrubber that actively took the CO2 out of the space cabin of the International Space Station to keep the astronauts alive. It was part of water, oxygen, CO2. As you know, if the CO2 builds up in a small room, you suffocate. Then the scientists who worked on that, Max Beaumont, a guy from the UK, living in the Netherlands, working for ESA. He founded Skytree through an incubator program.

So he got a pot of money and then he recruited some other scientists and they brought the technology from space to terrestrial. And so the difference is in space, you have space, know, lot of space. You don't have weight, you have vacuum to move gases around. You've got big budgets from ESA and on earth you don't have all of that. So, so the first few years he, you know, he made the technology work in a little box.

And those days were completely different when you think of CO2 compared to now. Now everybody knows, everybody you ask, yeah, CO2 got too much in the atmosphere. But at that time, you know, there was maybe a very tiny group that was worried about it. So, he was looking for use cases. He built the smallest deck unit of the world. I think it still is, that could bubble CO2 in an aquarium to stimulate plant growth, but not too much because then the fish would die.

Well, obviously there was no market for that device, but you know, kept on developing. He built actually a great IP portfolio, knowledge base, test lab for sorbents, the carbon capture materials. And until the end of 2021, in the five years before he was working for large automotive companies, all the famous brands, including Tesla.

to build a filter system that takes CO2 out of the car cabin, similar as in International Space Station. So if you take the CO2 actively out of the area where the passengers are seated, then you don't have to get fresh air from outside to bring the PPM level of CO2 below the threshold. And then if you don't need to take air from outside, you don't need to heat or cool that air. So it was a range extension.

device for electric vehicles, because you could save power of the battery because 35 % of the batteries on average are spent on air treatments, air circulation and all of that. So anyway, a lot of tests in test cars for a lot of famous brands, but Max started to figure out that it was very difficult to build a profitable company.

on that because, know, will Volkswagen or Tesla buy a gazillion filters from the eight people company? Probably not, you know, and if you get a contract, how do you manufacture that? And it will take you five years and there are regulations around CO2 in cars. So it will maybe take 12 years. So he was looking for another solution. And in the meantime, CO2 as a phenomenon really got

known that was IRA was introduced and all the attention IPCC got involved. So we need technology. And so then the idea was born to pivot Skytree and to boost it, build machines, make use of the head start of knowledge that was there. There were only a handful of air capture companies. You don't believe it like two and a half years ago. Now there more than a hundred. Yeah, seriously. Yeah, I know there's a lot.

And billions of investments, but there wasn't that two and a years ago, there wasn't, there was a handful. Kleinwerks, carbon engineering and two or three others, Airbus that comes from the same space station and Skytree. So, so the idea was born to build machines for the global markets and Max didn't have that experience. So the decision with him and the shareholders was to find a CEO with some mileage of building global companies and that then they asked me. Yeah.

Awesome. I guess now break down just, you know, there's a lot of different carbon capture out there. So can you just give us the summary of the technology itself and where in the market you specifically play? Sure. There are a couple of technology families for carbon capture from the outside air. We choose to use what we call sorbent based temperature swing. That means that we use carbon capture material, tiny sort of plastic beads.

that come from the water purification industry, but also catch CO2 molecules. So we blow air through filters where this material is immobilized and then this material captures the CO2 molecules. And then, you know, let's say after half an hour catching, you heat up that filter with the capture material and the CO2 molecules release. So you capture them in vacuum.

And then you can either store it in a tank on the pressure as gas, or you can go to the next treatment, is liquefaction. So you can deliver it at a liquid state and use it then for food and beverage or storage or transport. So, so that's the basic principles of those technologies. are other technologies like pH swing, moisture swing, electro swing. Some of these are more promising than the others. The reason why we stick with this technology, although we understand all these.

these other technologies very well is because this can be scaled up. There's an existing supply chain. can create volume manufacturing as one reason, while some of the other technologies require new industries that are currently not there yet, or partially there. in our opinion, it will be more difficult to scale up to volume and mass manufacturing.

And the other reason to select this technology is that there's so much room for improvement. So even though some of the other technologies have a promise that they consume less electricity per ton, the improvement roadmap of our technology, we think can beat the promise of the other technologies who are actively working on that to realize those roadmap deliveries. those are the...

The two reasons why we selected this technology over other available technologies. So when you look at the direct air capture companies, then some are operators that develop their own technology. So they have a storage license specifically in the U.S. and they then develop their own technology, trying to outsmart everybody else and then live off of carbon credits. We are not an operator.

We sell our technology to operators like DeepSky. I already mentioned it's public information. So that's the first split in categories, right? We are a technology provider and enabling technology. Then of the enabling technologies, there are again two main categories. There are the companies that build large scale plants. There are many famous ClimaWorks is doing that carbon engineering is two famous ones. So they build a plant.

with 100,000 or 500,000 ton a year capacity. And we are in the category that builds machines, machines that do 300, 500 ton per annum. So then it narrows down, then we're with a smaller group of company that actually build machines. And we think machines is the way to go because a plant takes like three, four years to materialize. You need to have a permit, work with the community.

get the FID and then start ordering components and build the thing. And, you know, it takes a couple of years. Machine has a very high velocity of innovation, at least with us. So we brought a small machine to the market less than a year ago, started to sell, then stopped sales and created the next version. And while we are switching to production version two, we are already developing version three because we we get data from using.

machines that learns us what to improve, high velocity of innovation. That's what you get if you don't build plants that have a velocity cycle of three, four years, but machines. Secondly, these machines, you can put them everywhere. So everywhere where you need CO2, because the CO2 market is both for permanent storage to create negative emissions, reduce the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

but also to put CO2 to use as CO2 is a beautiful molecule that's used everywhere in society. That you cannot do with a plant, that you can do with a direct air capture machine that you can put next to a Coca-Cola bottle or a greenhouse or use for welding or transport of organs or stunning animals or whatever these use cases are. And because you can put a machine at the location where you need CO2,

you can disrupt the current fossil fuel based supply chain where CO2 is captured in fossil fuel industries, fertilizer plants, oil refineries, steel companies. then so it's captured in the exhaust. So the emission doesn't take place because the CO2 is captured. The toxic stuff is taken out, it's purified, it's liquefied and then it's transported to where it's needed. And then it's used, for instance, to stimulate food production or to drink your Coca-Cola. But through

these use cases, that CO2 still comes in the atmosphere. It's a postponed emission, right? If you drink cola, you drink bubbles from oil and through your breath, that CO2, that emission still takes place. When you drink cola, you're emitting on behalf of the oil company or wherever the CO2 came from, right? Not a lot of people realize this. So if you want to change those emissions into circular CO2, right? So we take it from

the air, then put it to use, it comes back in the air, right? Now we made that CO2 circular. That's a big game. So what do these large emitters then have to do with their CO2? Well, you could argue it shouldn't be there in the first place, but you can't flip a switch in nowadays society. It will take decades. So they still need to catch their CO2, but they need to store it on the ground so that they neutralize their emissions.

That's where direct air capture machines come in because at Biogenic CO2 as well as new sources of CO2 for use, eliminating the emissions that currently take place by using CO2. That you can only do if you have machines that you can put on a decentralized application. Now, coming back to these large scale facilities for large scale permanent storage or large scale e-fuel production or,

these large plants, you can also put a hundred machines next to each other. Then you have the same capacity as a plant. But the beauty of machines also here is that you can do a phase deployment. You can put a machine on site first, check how it works with your energy integration, show it to your investors if you're depending on raising money to roll out your project, test the storage, you know, and be quick. Buy a machine, put it on site.

and then get started instead of waiting three, four years until the plant is done. And what is the technology that you get? Maybe the industry has moved on with the high velocity as I was just explaining to you. So you miss all that because your plant was designed three years ago. So I'm a very strong believer in machines versus plants. So we call it parks, parks versus plants. I think parks and single machines.

are really the way to scale up this technology to mature it, get into mass production, drive down the cost. And, you know, I sound like a broken record, but a high velocity of innovation. Yeah. And that's how this industry will scale up and mature. I'm pretty convinced it's almost our religion to do exactly this. So this is really good. I'm going to try to recap a few things for the audience. in terms of where you guys play in the market, your objective is create machines, you know,

You can mass produce these things and that way you get around the entire challenges of permitting a big plant that has to go in somebody's backyard. And then you've got local communities who may be in favor of helping fix climate change, but they may not want this thing in their backyard. So you get around that and that's the market you plan. Also, the benefit of that is it allows you to iterate faster on the product itself because you can build a few, make sure it's working versus taking three years to build one and test your pilot to then get the data. You can get the data much faster.

The second piece that I want to make sure we unpack is you're mentioning here that the current industry, the way things work is one of the vast companies are capturing their carbon and selling it to greenhouse, like greenhouses or other people who use carbon. And as a result, you have no actual decarbonization because the carbon is going back into the air eventually, but you're, you're suggesting that these same organizations that use carbon.

they can capture it on site and use it for their production, which then is a net negative. It's bringing out out carbon from the air. Correct. So can you just walk us through that part again and make sure people understand that? Cause this is something I had never heard until you and I spoke. And I'd like to make sure that this is very clear for the audience. It was, it was a great summary, except for your last few words, because it's not net negative. So let's repeat that piece because this is really, and I'm used to people hearing this for the first time and I'm often explaining this story on stage at events. So.

So what happens if you, let's take ammonia plants are a big source of CO2, right? Fertilizer plants. So the CO2 is not emitted, but it's captured. And then there's a process of capturing, purifying, liquefying, transporting, right? So those steps actually add carbon footprint to the ton of CO2 that comes out of the exhaust of the

the process, right? So now we have CO2 comes from a fossil fuel source and it's actually amplified in its carbon footprint. Now we use this ton of CO2 for Coca-Cola. I use Coca-Cola and tomatoes as examples, right? So you eat the tomato, you drink the Coca-Cola through people eating or drinking and the human body, that CO2 that you consumed.

will get into the atmosphere again. It's not got the emission is not gone, right? Now, if I insert in the greenhouse or in the beverage, CO2 that I take from a non fossil fuel source from the air, it will still get back in the air through people eating and drinking. But now we made it circular. We took it from the air and it goes back in the air. So no emissions take place.

Well, no emissions except for the energy that the process costs to capture and release the CO2 and energy it costs, the carbon footprint it costs to build these machines. But then if you compare the two, there's a huge use delta between the two. So switching to sustainable CO2 for usage is a big thing. Yeah. So the benefit though, if you pursue it this way, is you have, like you said, existing supply chain, you have a business model.

that allows you to have buyers of your technology so that you can improve the technology itself. And then if you want to, you can actually just turn these into carbon capture plants only where they're not feeding the carbon back to a greenhouse, for example. Is this correct? 100%. And now it's full circle because if we build a deck park similar to what the Climb Works and the carbon engineering are doing or Climb Works is doing, it's the same technology. And then

you capture the CO2 from the air, you store it on the ground. you have a negative emission. Then you're reducing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. So can you talk about specifically your partnership with greenhouses in this space? Because I believe you mentioned something around how the oil and gas companies are no longer supplying them with CO2 because of the pushback they've gotten for not actually capturing anything. So can you just talk about this and how you uncovered this and how the partnership works? Sure.

So actually it's beneficial to be headquartered in the Netherlands as we've got such professional greenhouse sector here. And it's not only the greenhouses themselves. I think we're like the number two when you look at production volume, but also the innovation sector around the greenhouses, which is world leading by far. We're by far the number one in greenhouse technology. And a lot of focus is on sustainability.

more sustainable food production. So many of the large greenhouse builders come from the Netherlands, but also innovators in all sorts of ways. Also seeds, you know, from the 10 leading seed companies in the world, seven are Dutch companies, right? And seeds are extremely important for future generations of food being resistant to, you know, changing population of attackers, biological attackers. Anyway.

Super beneficial to be here as there's so much innovation going on here and there's a whole ecosystem that helps innovators like Skytree. So the Wageningen University is worldwide recognized. So their research center already has Skytree unit on site for I think eight or 10 months now. Testing it, coming with scientific proof that our CO2 is safe to use to grow cucumbers and the like.

There's a commercial, similar institute called Delphi. There's a unit from us there being tested, but there's also things like World Horty Center and Horty Heroes. There are ecosystems that bring us in contact with innovators. We already have a bunch of Dutch greenhouses that signed up for the big strategy unit while we still have to produce it. They already purchased such a unit because they want to be among the early adopters.

There's help from government, from the Association of Dutch Greenhouses. And this is all because in the Netherlands, we are the number one country to recognize the emissions that come from food production that can be avoided. So there is pressure on the companies that supply the CO2, Shell and Jara being the biggest suppliers, oil refinery and fertilizer plant. So what they selected to do is to continue to capture their CO2, which they do.

but no longer put it to use at greenhouses, but stored permanently on the ground. So Shell is redirecting 300,000 ton from greenhouses to subsurface storage under the North Sea. The Portos project is quite a famous project. Yara is also redirecting CO2 to permanent storage, also public knowledge. That means that there's a big shortage expected for CO2 for greenhouses. So somebody has to fill in that gap. But...

But more impactful is that there's an agreement between the greenhouse sector and the Dutch government that emissions in greenhouses have to be reduced by 50 % by 2030 and food production needs to be fossil fuel by 2040. That means that greenhouses can no longer burn natural gas on site to produce CO2, which is a common practice. So there's millions of tons of CO2 emitted every year.

through food production in the Netherlands. It's the same in other countries, right? The Netherlands is the first country that is banning that practice. So, and if you can't use fossil, if you can't burn fossil fuels on site, oil or gas, and capture the CO2 in the exhaust, your supply is drying up. You need to switch to other forms of heating, geothermal, electric, but then you can't capture the CO2 anymore. And the supply from industry is drying up. So,

there is no future supply of CO2 for the Dutch greenhouse sector. And it's not, you cannot live without, it's not a nice plant. It's a need to have it, it's fertilizer. Because if you grow crops in a closed environment, then the CO2 levels go down and you're really close, the plants will die. You need CO2. You're also growing it in a concentrated situation too. It's not just out in the open, right? So there's by nature just not enough.

That's interesting. this is, I don't think this is something, again, not until we had talked and I had learned about this. It's not, I don't think it's a pretty widely discussed topic. Especially in the U.S. Most of our food production is not grown in greenhouses to my knowledge. So that's, it's very interesting. I really find this very, very just fascinating. I think it's quite interesting how everybody's working together it seems. And it's creating a nice outcome because they're going to decarbonize in many other ways, but also.

It's then forcing the oil and gas companies or the emitters to actually spend the money to store the carbon, right? So we've got that kind of double-edged sword there. There's a lot of interest from Canada, from US, from Australia, New Zealand, Germany into this greenhouse application. So specifically in North America, there's a lot of interest. We just opened an office in Nashville. We opened an office in Toronto. So North America is a super important market for us, including

those greenhouses just easier if you start in the Netherlands. One topic I want to touch a little bit more on, we did talk about it mostly, which is driving down costs through scaling. We understand how you've done it, right? Focusing on a market where people need, they really need this product effectively. And you've already started working on your second or third iterations of your product. But what are the core things other founders can learn in terms of the, let's say the core levers that need to be pulled?

in order to actually drive down costs to scale. So yeah, I mean, when you look at what happened with solar, went down in cost, it went down 90, 95 % in 40 years because of volume, right? Volume and velocity of innovation, what we spoke about before. So with direct air capture, we need to do the same thing, but not in 40 years, but in four years. Some pretty authoritative sources predict

that the direct air capture industry will be as big as automotive is now. So mass production and innovation will drive down costs, but that's easier said than done. mean, if you go one level deeper, how do you do that? Do you build a factory and then build another factory and a bigger factory? Well, that takes years, right? So working with your supply chain,

is extremely important. We started to do that long before we brought our first product to the market as we recognized at the time already that building up a supply chain that can scale is essential if you want to go further than successful pilots and prototypes, which to be honest is what a lot of tech companies do. Their goal is to create a pilot and then make a plan on what's next. So we...

We inherently had the plan to scale up to large volumes where we started this journey. And we engaged with KPMG supply chain consults at the time to help us select the right supply chain partners. We went up to the CEO, sometimes the board members of those companies to ensure we got their support and their willingness to scale up with us. We spent a lot of time on our agreements, doing tests and dry runs.

having executive steercows to see if we're on track. So, you know, the laser focus, your supply chain is super important. Then we also put in our contracts with our largest manufacturing partners, incentives to cost down. So that cost down is not a one-way traffic to us, but that we both would benefit from cost down programs. That helps a lot. And then the other thing that's really important to the design.

and the ongoing improvements of your technology is where we started the conversation with these people. Do you have the teams, the tech teams, the R &D teams, the engineering teams, the mechatronic people, the electronics, the software people, the test teams? Are they capable of improving the technology? Come up with new ideas, test things out with universities first, get ideas, then build prototypes and do these things in parallel.

So it's about the supply chain and it's about the people. It's always about the people. Got it. Okay. That's really helpful. I appreciate that. You know, you've got a couple, let's say hot tanks, I guess you could say on this space. one of those, I like to cover a couple of those. One of those is that climate tech should work with large emitters because there are solutions there. So can you talk a little bit about that? A hundred percent. And I'm always a little bit intrigued.

almost by the two communities that don't talk to each other. You've got the large emitters on the one hand, and then the climate tech companies that don't even want to know people that work at a large emitter, let alone collaborate. I'm a better person because I large emitters more than you. we have a different view. We think that we should collaborate. And we think that large emitters are actually part of the solution to combat climate change. And of course.

They need to stop existing. Fine. We'll get that, right? Large emitters shouldn't exist. Fine. But let's get real. They are there and they will not go away as fast as some people hope. And if that would happen, then there's a lot of other problems that will hit us as societies. So it's not going to happen. It will take time for the society to decarbonize. And even if that would happen, let's say tonight.

And all emissions will be stopped. There's still, we've got too much CO2 levels in the atmosphere and still our climate will head for disaster. So, you know, we need solutions anyway. Now what's currently happening in the U.S. and in Kenya and other hotspots, there are deck plants built somewhere in nature or close to a community. So we cut the trees, we work with the local community. You referred to it earlier.

in this conversation as well. And then, you know, because there's a storage site there, right? So we built the deck plant on top of the storage site. But if you think about the volume of deck plants we need to remove a gigaton of CO2 from the atmosphere, that's almost a country like the Netherlands, right? It's big. Until this technology really improves, you need a lot of land. So let's go back to where we were.

with the large emitters capturing their CO2 and then storing it underground. Where do they store it? They store it in empty oil and gas reservoirs, right? That's what they usually do, specifically oil companies, because they own these empty wells. They already have piping to those wells. It's already there. And there's already, if I remember well, there's already more than 600 of...

what I call CCS projects, carbon capture and sequestration, large emitters like Shell and Yara, the ones I mentioned, that capture their CO2 and have stored permanently where it came from, right? Underground. But they already have the infrastructure, the piping and the storage sites are already there. You don't need to drill. You don't need to cut trees because you can build your deck park at the industrial site of the large emitter.

connect to their piping, which is already there, which goes to the storage side, which is already there. And it's already in use because they switched from capturing their CO2 and putting it to use to capturing their CO2 and store it permanently. There are already 600 of these projects, more than 600 of these projects whereby the CO2 is captured at the emitting source and then stored permanently on the ground. So why don't we use their infrastructure for direct air capture and storage?

Yeah, I mean, it's such a more efficient use of dollars, right? Because otherwise you have the added challenges of spending the money to develop these new storage sites versus also, I guess, there's probably technical risk and project overruns where you can just plug into these existing infrastructure. think it's a very good point to point out. think it is this whole thing requires a bit of pragmatism that I think some climate, let's call them climate professionals, are

against using, right? They don't like the idea of partnering with people who cause the problem because yes, they may not be as serious as they say about decarbonizing, but we have to be pragmatic. We really want to make this happen. We need to find out ways to do it fast and to do it efficiently, right? So I appreciate that. Another, if you want to talk about this, another hot take you have is that we're never going to fully go away from oil. So can you talk about your take there? Well, that's not for me to have an opinion on. I drive an electric car.

I've isolated my house, I do what I can, but I'm just one person on earth. I think it will take time before oil disappears. Also looking at political climates around the globe towards this topic. But it's not for me to have an opinion on. I just observe that it will take time for the oil economy to switch to another economy. That's not so simple.

And even if we would stop all emissions today, all oil production today, then still we need technology to solve the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. So for me, doesn't really, I'm all for energy transition in a balanced way so that people continue to support it and that the sacrifices of the transition go hand in hand with the time it requires, that there's a balance.

people keep on supporting it. And you see some societies that people stop supporting it because they feel threatened in the way they live. So I'm an activist myself and a lot of people that I know, but I'm not an activist to the extent that we have to force this oil economy to stop faster than we can cope with as humanity.

I think it's important to point out that electrification in general or energy increase in developing countries, for example, is very, very beneficial for humanity. I know it obviously has the negative effects if it's being powered by oil, that's very bad for the atmosphere, but we can't disregard the fact that many people's lives are being improved by getting power. So as long as we can find a way to get them power in a clean way,

we can avoid these issues, right? Just do it, get to scale, get to everything that's cheap and that way it makes it a no-brainer to use renewables in the first place. And then you never really needs to have oil in the first place. So we'll move on from that. I appreciate you pointing this out. I think it's something a lot of people overlook. We're running out of time, but I do especially want to ask you about your view on the carbon capture or let's call it carbon capture startup landscape, if you will. You alluded to it earlier. There's so many companies in this space.

People talk about, think the Catalyst podcast recently mentioned, or not too long ago mentioned that there's gonna be a lot of consolidation in this space, there their take because they're just simply not enough buyers of carbon. So do you have any take on this on the macro over the next few years? What's gonna happen to these startups? What's gonna happen in terms of the carbon market itself? Any kind of thoughts you'd like to share there? Yes, so partially we already discussed the companies that are operator themselves, that companies that develop technology and are operator.

I think that can be difficult because you need to spend the money to develop the technology, produce it, and you don't have income because you need to wait until your site is ready. So that is not an easy business model. Then the deck plants builders have also a problem, but they don't have the cost of developing their own technology. it's still okay.

These dedicated removal companies that live off of carbon credits or government programs, they have the risk that if there's not enough liquidity coming from those government programs and or from voluntary markets, then their business model can be under pressure. Having said that, increasingly countries come up with programs. So if you look at it from a global perspective and not from a US,

perspective, it's looking okay. There's more and more countries that say, we as a government will buy these removals, these storage. We pay this and that per ton. It's all different regulations. So in spite of the news you read about the voluntary carbon credits markets, there's a lot of government initiatives outside North America that recently were announced. So there's certainly a positive outlook for those companies.

At Skytree, we are part of that smaller group of companies that are less sensitive to voluntary carbon markets or government programs, as we also sell machines to those people that want to pay for the CO2, a real economy. So we are less vulnerable to that changing landscape. But I do think there's a bit of teething problems in this industry.

Because of the gold rush, so everybody think, a few students with a cool idea from university and then we built this cool prototype, let's create a company. Let's get, we can get a license. We're going to drill and we're going to be gazillionaires because we sell these carbon credits and oops, oops, it's not so easy to get a permit or to get the energy like what happened in Wyoming the other day or to get.

verified carbon credits. so what about your metering? if you don't even know what an audit is, I think there will be some companies that might underestimate it, what it takes to get to a profitable business and are depending on societal money, I call it. So consolidation for sure.

What happened actually, we will soon announce our own little acquisition anytime soon. We signed it, but not published it. And I think there will be opportunities for companies like us and players that scale up quickly to also absorb these other companies because there's often great and bright people. know, so maybe it's better to just glue them together in a bigger entity than everybody's trying to build this new ASML.

Yeah, no, I think, I mean, you bring up some good points. mean, if we look at any like new technology boom, usually there's a lot of people who enter. Some of them genuinely have breakthrough technology. Some of them have like really good business model innovation. And oftentimes, at least from from what I've seen on the pod, people don't usually have all of those those things. So if you can find a way to merge with those companies who have the thing that you don't have that can be helpful, or in your case, you know, if you if you

If some company has found a lot of buyers for carbon or other people who want to develop projects and maybe they've got lots of permits lined up, now perhaps they can use your technology to actually fill those locations rather than developing their own because you've gotten to a greater maturity. And it's okay, right? It benefits everybody. Yes, there's some losers, but at the end of the day, you cannot have a couple major winners unless you have many, many people trying for shots on goal, right? To achieve the new technology breakthrough or whatnot.

I, you know, it obviously is going to suck for some people. No pun intended. But it's going to be challenging for some people, but there's going to be, I think, a lot of really nice mature companies that come out of this. think we're starting to see that. And I'm pretty excited to see what that reality looks like and also a bit of the pragmatism that comes along with it of making, you know, making actual impact in space. But I think we're effectively out of time for today. Any final thoughts that you would share with people or where they can reach you? Any actions they can take? Well, one thing we didn't.

talk about a lot is that direct air capture requires energy. there's two solutions to that use of energy. One is to ensure the innovation drives down the energy consumption per ton of CO2. That's obvious. But the other one is to look for the intersections of locations where you want to either store or use the CO2 and then combine that with an optimal supply of energy. So one example.

is we spoke about collaborating with large emitters and use their industrial lands to build a deck park, And their capital and their piping and their storage sites. But also they often produce heat. So we can use that industrial heat to power, to partially power our machines. Another example is a very large project that we won in the U.S. actually, where there are wind parks that produce too much energy.

which is a problem because they can't get it to the grid. And that it's not easy to stop these large wind turbines and all of that. So we're going to use the surplus of renewable energy, convert that into CO2 molecules that we filter out of the air and then store it at that side, at that wind park side on the ground. So that's another way of solving, know, finding the intersection between abundant.

availability of renewable energy, not take it, not take the renewable energy from consumers and companies, right, because that doesn't make sense. It's often heard, moral has a thing. And I agree. So it's much better to take the energy that is renewable energy does not use anyway, or that is that is a waste energy, and to focus on on the locations where that energy is available. And then you know, then your your climate gain is the most effective. So

just wanted to add that to our book. I really appreciate that. I usually ask some quick questions at the end, but you've already talked about some of the founders you like. Maybe one last thing would be, there any particular, throughout your career, it doesn't have to be climate related, specifically any particular book or piece of content, maybe a movie or show or something that really ever influenced the way you think or the way you kind of look at life? Yeah, that was actually when I joined EVBox.

time, when was it? 2018, I think 2018 or 2019. So I was put to test. That was kind of funny. It was a role play, right? So there were real actors and I was put in a situation and I got, you know, I had an email box and it was all very professional with a, with a bureau and or an agency. And, then, so I did my game and you know, I had issues with my team and with an angry customer and with my boss being crazy and all of that. So then.

A few days later, you have a conversation with a professional who studies your behavior and your results. And for me, that was such an eye opener because she said, well, you you're great. You solved all these problems. You're super remarkable. But why do you do that all yourself? Why didn't you use your team members for it? Right. And that was such an important lesson for me. That really changed my way of mentoring to come back to that.

to really invest in young talent rather than doing it for them, but helping them to be the best version of themselves. So that became my religion after that, after that event in my life. That's, that's pretty powerful way to end it. I think we got to stop it there. Thanks so much for coming on the pod, Rob. This has been really a pleasure. I've really, really enjoyed this. It was a pleasure being there. Thank you. Thank