#225 Solving Sulfur Waste while Capturing Carbon & Producing Sulfuric Acid & Hydrogen w/ Owen Cadwalader (Travertine)

Learn how this carbon capture startup also produces green chemicals AND hydrogen -- how they funded their first demo plant -- their secrets to building a resilient business model -- and what he would advise Trump's admin in order to help keep climate on track while also competing with China. 

Listen Time: Full Show 58:31 (no ads) | Free Preview 37:14

On today’s episode, Owen Cadwalader, the COO of Travertine, delivers one of the most value-dense episodes we’ve ever released. 

Hear how they are solving the massive sulfur waste problem while also capturing carbon and producing sulfuric acid and hydrogen. 

In a short time, they are on track to build their first plant, producing ~100 tons a year near Rochester, NY. They have also navigated the startup landscape masterfully. 

There is a lot to learn here. 

Some of the discussion topics: 
**How to interact with the chemical industry 
**How to reframe CO2 emissions as waste 
**How to get the Trump admin to back climate 
**The sulfate waste landscape 

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Topics
(time stamps are accurate for the full episode and approximate for the free preview)
**00:00 Intro
**02:54 Owen's Journey to Tech
**06:08 Travertine’s Tech
**08:53 Multiple Revenue Streams
**12:06 Customer Base and Market Challenges
**14:55 Environmental Impact of Sulfate Waste
**17:47 Navigating the Chemical Industry Landscape
**21:09 Pricing Strategies & Market Competition
**29:22 Identifying Beachhead Markets in Climate Tech
**30:48 Navigating Political Landscapes for Climate Tech

—(Free Version ends here)—

**32:13 Building Resilient Climate Tech Businesses
**34:04 On-shoring
**35:59 Global vs Local Impact of Resource Extraction
**36:29 The Future of Carbon Dioxide Removal
**37:52 Focusing on Outcomes Over Technology
**40:43 Funding Strategies for Climate Tech Projects
**43:05 Advocating for Continued Innovation Funding
**45:22 Reframing CO2 as Industrial Waste
**50:00 Lessons from Fundraising in Climate Tech

Links
**Owen Cadwalader | Travertine
**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
• 2:54 Owen's Journey to Tech
• 6:08 Travertine’s Tech
• 8:53 Multiple Revenue Streams
• 12:06 Customer Base and Market Challenges
• 14:55 Environmental Impact of Sulfate Waste
• 17:47 Navigating the Chemical Industry Landscape
• 21:09 Pricing Strategies & Market Competition
• 29:22 Identifying Beachhead Markets in Climate Tech
• 30:48 Navigating Political Landscapes for Climate Tech

Transcript

CleanTechies (00:00)
The piles of sulfate waste for us are in the US or in Florida because that's where the fertilizer industry is. And actually the two highest points in Florida are fossil gypsum mounds. They're sulfate waste mounds. Most good climate tech solutions aren't necessarily simple. My advice would be one, find the right VC that understands the space and what we were doing. One of the hesitations of why people are like, well, why do we need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is they don't.

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. Welcome back to Clean Techies, a podcast where we interview the leading climate tech entrepreneurs around the world and distill their lessons to share them here with you so you can benefit from their experience. I'm Silas Manor and today I'm your host. For written analysis and in-depth show notes of each episode, be sure to subscribe on our Substack at cleantechies.substack.com.

All right, let's get into it. Today I am speaking with Owen Cadwallader, the COO of Travertine, a Boulder, Colorado based climate startup with a three in one technology. What I mean by that is they have carbon capture. They also produce sulfuric acid and green hydrogen. And while they are a little bit of a newer name to the space, they're quickly approaching a deployment of their first demo plant and just outside of Rochester, New York. I believe if I'm not mistaken from memory that I'll be going live next year sometime 2025.

And that will produce over a hundred tons of sulfuric acid per year. So, you know, pretty impressive for a relatively new startup. In case you don't know, sulfuric acid is a by-product of many different processes, but especially the production of fertilizer, mining of critical minerals, and the production of specialty chemicals. So in other words, it's something that touches the kind of the things that we all benefit on a daily basis from. So, you know, it's a quite important thing if you'd like to keep all of our modern day nice things.

And there are places where this waste is actually just piling up causing toxic runoff. And it's also just a big eyesore. I made a little bit of a laugh about it in the episode. But in Florida, apparently the highest point of Florida is kind of this landfill of just this byproduct of sulfuric acid. this also, just as kind of a disclaimer, this episode is perhaps the most dense episode we've ever covered because

Thankfully, Owen is extremely no-nonsense type of guy who packs a lot of value into what he says. Not a of filler words, unlike me sometimes, but it is a really good conversation. A couple of the things we discussed in today's conversation are, of course, his story of joining Travertine and the story of Travertine itself. We obviously go into the technology and break down how their business model works. Perhaps most importantly, he shares how they utilize effectively a three revenue stream model to help them win. It gives them a lot more

flexibility to kind of have different ways of succeeding. They don't have to have, for example, know, carbon credits don't have to be in vogue at the time for them still to win. It's just a benefit to them. So it's really super interesting on that point that a lot of founders can take, can take note from. shares a lot about that. And then there was quite a lot of parts of the show where I basically treated him as a hypothetical advisor to the Trump campaign or to the Trump administration, I should say, on how they could support climate technologies.

while also winning in the kind of industrial Cold War against China. So a little bit of an interesting take there. He's got some really, really fascinating perspectives. I think you're going to like it. I hope you're going to enjoy it. In fact, I know you're going to enjoy it. With that, let's get into the conversation with Owen. All right. Welcome to the pod, Owen. How's it going today? It's good. Yeah. Beautiful day in Boulder, Colorado. I wish I could say the same, but winter has begun to set in in Wisconsin and it's kind of that...

hail, rain, snow type of year. So I don't go outside as frequently as possible. stay inside. Sounds like you should move. I will at some point, just here for the temporary, for the time being. But anyways, Matt, I guess let's get started. Tell us. Yeah. Well, I did start in this sector when it was called CleanTech. But I do like the climate tech rebrand. I think it would be Jennifer Holmgren, who's the longtime CEO of Landsatech that was a CleanTech 1.0 company.

still around today, turning CO2 into fuels. And the reason is she's seen a lot and they've scaled up chemical plants, which is really important and very relevant to what we're doing at Travertine. The other thing that I just want to highlight with CleanTech 1.0 is that everybody thinks of it as kind of a failure. And it really wasn't at all, all from a venture perspective. Kleiner Perkins.

showed that they invested about a billion dollars and turned that into $3 billion. So not bad from a total venture return perspective. It just took longer than software companies, which is not surprising. Yeah, exactly. No, I think those are really good notes. I'm a big fan of Lanza Tech. We need to get them on the pod at some point. It's been really exciting watching their kind of, I guess they're like a sister company on Lanza Jet, I think, with some of their recent plans and scale up. really exciting to see.

actual jobs being created and real scale being achieved. And it's hard to go from the lab all the way to commercial chemical plant. Exactly. Yeah. It's not easy competing with the big ones, right? But I guess tell us a little bit more about your background and kind of your personal journey into climate and entrepreneurship generally. Sure. Yeah. I guess I'll start in college. I was a geology major in college. at that point, I got really interested in the particular area of geology and earth sciences where

humans impact the earth and the earth impacts humans. And so when I was figuring out what to do post-masters, there wasn't a whole lot of options. The most interesting one at the time was environmental consulting or environmental engineering, where I was investigating contaminated sites and then designing and implementing remedies to clean up those contaminated sites. And from a technology and a...

And a science and engineering perspective, it was really interesting, but it was really frustrating because we were kind of at the end of line. Industries that already made something, made their money and made a whole lot of pollution and left it on the earth. And we had decades later come back and clean it up. It's also consulting is not a very inspiring business model because just brains by the hour and you scale that business by adding more people. So anyway, there was a group of...

There was a group of people in the company that were working on a new technology. It was kind of the early stage of Internet of Things. And we were remotely monitoring and controlling different sites. And the niche we found was in stormwater management. so was take a simple infrastructure, a pond that's meant to capture stormwater and lower the level of the pond based on forecasted rain.

And so you effectively with technology increase the effective area of a piece of simple civil infrastructure and can reduce flooding, reduce erosion, improve water quality. And so we kind of built a product around this and then spun it out of the consulting firm, raised venture capital, formed a new company. And that was my first taste of entrepreneurship and that company is still around today. And so anyway, that.

that had run its course for me and I moved to another early stage company in air purification, helped them grow the B2B and HVAC side of the business, worked in renewable energy for a little bit and now a Traver team. Yeah, that's awesome. That's a really cool journey. think I would be curious to ask more questions about the IoT device company in the stormwater space. I feel like there's some interesting things, but we'll have to take that for another time. Yeah, you should get them on the podcast. Alex Bedig from Opti would be a great, person to get on your pod.

We'll definitely have to do that. I'll have my producer take note of that. Okay, so that's really great. So I guess then, you know, that brings us to Travertine. Tell us the story behind that. How did you end up kind of working at Travertine and joining in the very early days? Yeah, it actually starts back in the Dartmouth Geology program. So Laura Lammers and I were friends in college. We went through the same program, the same geology program in college, and she took the academic route.

blew through very rapidly a PhD and a postdoc and became a professor at UC Berkeley and an expert in carbonate mineralization. And I kind of took the more applied route through environmental engineering and then entrepreneurship and startups and bringing technologies from lab to market. the other piece of the story is that when Laura was at Berkeley, she had a joint appointment at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. And she was part of a group looking at the

at lithium extraction in the U S and she was talking with the CEO of a lithium company and about how they're extracting lithium. They're it's lithium from clay stones. And so the extraction methodology is basically use sulfuric acid to extract it. And so to create the sulfuric acid, you start with elemental sulfur. So they were trucking in elemental sulfur. They had to do a lot of road improvements to truck in the elemental sulfur. And so Laura's a geologist is saying, well, there's a lot of sulfate in the desert. Can we use that?

And that combined with her long time thinking about how do we actually do carbon dioxide removal at scale at an economical perspective, she kind of combined those two influences and developed this electrochemical technology for recycling acid and doing end-to-end carbon dioxide removal. So she did a proof of concept in her lab at UC Berkeley and we were catching up and she said,

You know, this technology looks like it's something that could actually scale and do carbon dioxide removal at scale and be economical. And I said, well, if you are thinking of taking it out of the university and making company, I'd love to help. And so here we are about two and a half years later and we've got 24 people and we're in the middle of engineering for demo plants. It's going in the field. So it's pretty, it's pretty exciting.

It does sound very exciting. I'm kind of curious. I you've had a lot of good experience prior to ending up joining Travertine. So like, was it pretty obvious to you that, you know, this is definitely something I want to get behind or was there any hesitation you had there? Like, what made you so confident to make that leap? That's a question. I'd say the first thing is that if there is anybody in the world that I know or have met that can think holistically about the carbon cycle and about how we can actually say scale carbon dioxide removal, it's Laura. She's one of the smartest people I've...

I've ever met and is an incredibly holistic thinker about things and not very, she's not a narrow thinker. And so that was really a first thing of saying, if Laura thinks this makes sense, I think it's probably something that makes sense. And also having known her for 20 years, I knew that we could work together really well. I think the other thing is that for me, looking at technologies to do carbon dioxide removal, ideally they have

other ancillary benefits for the environment and can have a business that's wrapped around them that isn't solely relying on the carbon dioxide removal market, because that's very nascent and we don't really know where that's going to go. And so I think those two things combined, the fact that we have other revenue streams other than just carbon dioxide removal and confidence in Laura and known ability to work together were the three things that said, yeah, I want to spend time doing this.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I like the point about having multiple, I guess, business lines or ways to make money. I think this is something often overlooked. Some people get really dogmatic about carbon capture and carbon removal, and then they kind of tend to make maybe silly startup decisions, if you will. So I appreciate that perspective. And I guess before we get into the technology itself and how it all works in particular, what is the overall vision or impact that you guys hope to have? Yeah. So I think just stepping back from that a little bit, I...

really believe personally that the best way to make environmental impact is to align positive environmental impact with positive business impact. And so you make sure that those two things are inherently linked and then you focus on making a really great business and scaling your business. For Traver Team specifically, the ultimate goal is for us to replace sulfur burners with our carbon negative and minimal waste process for producing and recycling acid and

for taking carbon out of the atmosphere. So that's our ultimate goal. we look back 20 years from now and we've replaced a good number of the sulfur burners in the world, we've been very successful. And real quickly, do you have an idea of roughly, like if you replaced all of those sulfur burners, what the kind of mitigation would be from a carbon perspective? Do you have those numbers? Well, no, not off the top of my head. Sulfur burners themselves are not carbon emitting. And so

It wouldn't be about mitigating carbon emissions from sulfur burning. It would be about mitigating a huge amount of waste and being able to do carbon dioxide removal. Got it. Okay. Very cool. But it would be on the order of hundreds of millions of tons a year. Yeah. So a huge, huge impact, right? That's good to hear. So I guess let's then go from here. Let's get into the technology itself. So just kind of...

Remember, keep in mind, a lot of us are not scientists. in a really simple term, explain to us what is your technology and what is the problem you're solving? Yeah. So we recycle sulfuric acid and that eliminates a byproduct or a waste product from both certain types of mining extraction and certain types of fertilizer production and other specialty chemical production. And the same chemical process that recycles acid, our travertine process,

also takes carbon directly from the air and makes a solid mineral out of it that you can quantify and that is permanent. And so essentially it's a circular chemical plant for enabling the production of fertilizer, the production of food products, and the production of metals that we need for the energy transition like lithium and nickel. So just make sure I got this right. There is kind of a waste product through certain mining processes that tends to get

kind of toss into the environment or they have to pay to dispose of it, I'm assuming, but you're able to help capture that and then turn it into additional products through your process that you're adding carbon capture to. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. So sulfuric acid is at the heart of it. And the way that you extract the element that you care about from a primary ore, you do a number of things. But one of the main things you do is you digest it with sulfuric acid. And what ends up is that you get

What you care about, let's take lithium, for example, or phosphorus for making fertilizer. You get that critical element from the ore, but you end up with a huge amount of waste, a huge amount of sulfate waste. And generally what happens to that today is it just gets landfilled in a specific landfill near the plant. And so what we can do is either recycle that byproduct and back into sulfuric acid to be used, or we can actually

go end to end and produce that end product. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I think this would be a good point to plug. If people haven't already heard, I'd recommend going check in our past episode with Liz Dennett from Endolith. They're also in the mining space. There's some similarities here. Let's talk about why is this important? Why is solving this problem important aside from reducing carbon emissions? Yeah. obviously, reducing carbon emissions is a big part of it. The other big part, and if you talk to people in the industry, the biggest part is managing the waste.

And so nobody wants to be producing this huge amount of sulfate waste or by-product. And everybody wants to figure out a better way to do this. And this is true across the globe. the biggest piles of sulfate waste for us are in the US or in Florida, because that's where the fertilizer industry is. And actually the two highest points in Florida are phosphogypsum mounds. They're sulfate waste mounds.

Yeah, it's kind of a crazy, I only laugh because Florida is so flat. I always make fun of it. lived in Florida for two months and I just always joked about how flat it was. It is flat, but it's still in 400, 500 foot high pile. And so it's a big problem in the US, it's a big problem in North Africa. It's a problem really throughout the world.

Eliminating waste is the primary driver that customers and partners are interested in. And the carbon dioxide removal, which is also a waste in and of itself, is another part of it, but a lesser extent than the sulfate waste. Is there any particular, I guess, studies or examples you can give, like the negative effects of just having that waste in those piles? Like, has it caused any particular events or climate events of any sort? Sure. Yeah, not any climate events, but it...

It is an environmental potential contaminant. And so the EPA regulates phosphogypsum, which is the waste that comes out of phosphate fertilizer production. They regulate it. You have to stack it. You have to hydraulically contain it. If you go and look up phosphogypsum in Florida, you'll see a number of issues where there's been sinkholes or there's been contamination of local waterways. And so it's...

It's a potential environmental contaminant beyond just being physically large as well. Yeah. I could also imagine there's probably, I don't know how you model this out, but there's probably huge costs if this does end up causing some kind of issue, like the local city governments or whatever, probably have huge costs to immediate it. Yeah, 100%. It's also a big cost and a big liability for these major corporations. Yeah. that's true, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

So, okay, then let's talk about who exactly are your customers. Yes. So our customers are anybody that is using sulfuric acid to produce an end product or potentially the consumers of those end products themselves. So what does that look like? That looks like mining companies that are mining lithium from clay stones, nickel from nickel laterites. The biggest portion and the biggest use about 55, 60 % of sulfuric acid use is used for phosphate mining.

phosphate mining to produce phosphoric acid to produce fertilizer that goes directly on farmers' fields. Okay. And then, so what are these customers currently doing as like a solution to this problem? Well, there isn't really a solution to this problem. What they're currently doing is using sulfuric acid to digest primary ores and producing this sulfate product, the phosphagyptium or sulfate product. And that's just landfill.

currently today. other thing I'll add is that, it's not only the fertilizer industry in phosphates, there's another part of the industry for purified phosphoric acid that goes into food. It's what is in Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and Pepsi. It's also the P and the P batteries. And so it's beyond just fertilizer and mining. It's also to make electric vehicles and also for food products.

Got it. So when you say there's no solution, do they typically pay for putting it in the landfill? There is a cost associated with managing the landfill, And it's not just sort of your municipal landfill. It's a dedicated stack for the Phosphagypsum product. I didn't have this in the kind of prep doc, but is there a particular ROI for these companies aside from mitigating the future?

financial risk of having to do remediation? Is there some kind of immediate return for them to recycle it? It's really hard to put a dollar per ton value on it because it's a long-term liability. not, it's basically, it's not on the P &L. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And then guess just to clarify for people, what are the, like, how are you revenue streams? I think this is really important part of the technology and why you joined. So explain to us the revenue streams. Yeah. So we have a mix of revenue streams and what it is is either

sulfuric acid or a product that's produced using sulfuric acid. So that could be lithium, could be nickel, it could be phosphoric acid. So that's the primary revenue stream. And then the other product that we produce is calcium carbonate. And calcium carbonate, it can be used as a supplementary cementitious material into cement. And so one of our biggest investors is actually Folsom, which is a Swiss cement company. And they're very interested in using the

calcium carbonate as a supplementary cementations material. And the third revenue stream is carbon removal credits. And so that's actually the smaller portion of our revenue stream. And I guess the thing I'm kind of curious if you could just maybe break this down from not from Traverty in perspective specifically, but for other entrepreneurs in climate, like why is it so important to have multiple revenue streams and maybe in particular for this space, for the chemical space? Why does that matter?

Well, I think it makes your business more resilient because if you're selling products that have changes in pricing or changes in regulation that changes what their pricing are or changes in demand, then you have other other revenue streams to rely on. So there isn't a chemical plant in existence that only produces one product. And so it's just kind of how the chemical industry runs and operates.

But it's not a simple thing that VCs tend to like, but I think it creates, and I think most people would agree, it ultimately creates a much more robust business. This is a really interesting point. So let's break that down a little bit. So you said VCs don't like, let's call it more complex kind of revenue models or business models in general. Can you just talk a little bit about that? then hopefully founders will understand the importance of thinking about more than just one product line.

a lot of these deep tech founders like, we've got the silver bullet for one thing, therefore we're going to make money. But can you break this down and how you had to pitch to VCs? Yeah. Well, VCs tend to like simple and they tend to like simple for a couple of reasons because then you're just focusing on one type of risk, whether it's technology risk or market risk. And also as a new company, it's hard to manage.

either a process that's complex or more than one thing at a time. So, VCs like simple and I understand that. But one of the challenges is that most robust and most good climate tech solutions aren't necessarily simple. And so that's a big challenge. so I guess my advice would be one, find the right VC that understands the space and understands what you're doing. Do your best to make the complex simple and then

show customer demand because if you show ultimately if you show customer demand, it means there's a market for what you are selling and it means that that will drive growth and drive the company forward even if it is something that's challenging to do. Yeah, that's really helpful. And I guess last thing and just kind of to recap the tech and we can move into some trends and topics here is where are you guys at today in terms of total scale? Yes, so we're in the middle of engineering a demo plant that'll be over 100 tons of

A of sulfuric acid that'll go into the ground of a site with our with a partner in outside of Rochester, New York in the middle of next year. So it's pretty exciting time. be our first real field deployment of the tech of the technology and we'll be taking gypsum a legacy stack of mind gypsum and producing sulfuric acid for Sabin metals corporation and Sabin is a.

wonderful company that recycles precious metals and they've been around for over a hundred years and they're an expert in precious metals recycling. So it's a pretty cool circular story from using old mind wastes in our new process to remove carbon dioxide, do sulfuric acid, and then ultimately have that sulfuric acid used in recycling of precious metals. one thing I didn't, I guess, plan to ask, but I'd be curious if...

You said you're building a plant. So is there any way that eventually this can be turned into a modular technology or does always have to be on a project by project basis? Yeah. So people love talking about modular technologies and there are advantages and disadvantages to modular technologies. The advantage is you can get really good at building that one thing and you can reduce your unit cost to produce that one thing. The bad thing is that as you scale, you don't get economies of scale.

on the actual overall project. So there are some disadvantages and advantages of modular technologies. Our technology, parts of it are modular. And so one of the main unit operations in our technology is electrolysis and electrolyser. And that is a very modular technology. Once you get one commercial scale cell, you add additional cells or additional banks of cells. So that unit is modular.

The direct air capture portion of our technology, we do caustic direct air capture and that is also a modular unit. But the balance of plant, which is mainly tanks and pumps and ion exchange and other types of equipment, that's not necessarily modular, nor does it make sense for that to be modular because as you scale, you don't want to have 500 small tanks. want a couple of big tanks, right? And that's cheaper. so.

I view our technology as a good blend of both modular and stick-built and scalable technologies. And I really think that for many technologies that need to achieve a larger scale is a good blend, not just saying, hey, we can build this in a shipping container and then build a lot of shipping containers. That actually doesn't work from an economics perspective for most technologies.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point. guess I never, I haven't really dug into this before. The reason I asked it was we had Skytrian recently in there. He was really bullish on saying that you need to build on a modular method for iteration cycles. But I think having that kind of combination is something at least if you're going to build projects, if you have to build project basis, at least have portions of it that you can achieve scale with. It depends what your business is and depends what you're doing.

I think it's trying to fit everything into one box doesn't make sense. Awesome. So let's shift gears a little bit. So I want to talk a little bit about pricing. You kind of alluded to it with having multiple product lines, but also just your go-to-market in general. A lot of people, they're thinking that they're going to compete at scale, commodity type of product. Can you just talk about your guys' path to going to market and having a high value product that you can compete with versus just trying to...

purely on a commodity basis and just maybe open this up for other people in the space who are working on related technologies. Sure. Well, competing with incumbent technologies producing a commodity is incredibly challenging because you're almost never going to compete on price with that commodity, at least on your first plant or your first several plants, right? Because that technology has been optimized for decades.

And you are starting at a smaller scale and generally there are economies of scale and you can't immediately build something as big as a company building that's already producing commodities. So it's really, really challenging, at least at first, to compete with commodity chemicals or anything that is a commodity. And so if you move to a higher value product or you take over more of the value chain, that gives you more margin to work with for your first several facilities, for your first several plants.

And then as you scale and as you cross down your technology and as you learn more about distribution and supply chain and everything that you can actually move, you can then move towards tech towards commodity. And depending on what your technology is, you may be able to eventually be cheaper than that commodity. But it's very, very challenging to start and say, I'm going to go take over the steel market, for example. And I'd say, you the classic example.

OG climate tech of this is Tesla, right? They started out with a hundred thousand dollar plus roadster, then the Model X, then the Model 3. They were going to do a $25,000 car, but I guess then they kind of went off the deep end with the Cybertruck. I think that they realized they needed to make some high margin type of vehicle. think if I'm not mistaken, trucks are in the general automotive industry, trucks are what really make the big bucks. So maybe that's what they had to do.

That is a good point. think this is something a lot of people, lot of founders in climate tend to get wrong is they don't recognize that you have to have a beachhead market where you can compete and then over time you can scale up. Do you think there are, if somebody's thinking of an idea today and they can't find a way to compete on a high value product initially, is it even worth pursuing that company, that opportunity if there's big incumbents?

Well, I think you've got to look at the techno economic analysis and you've got to be real about your techno economic analysis and you've got to go talk to people in the industry and see if it's feasible. There certainly are, could be technologies out there that can produce at a small scale on your first client, lower costs than commodities, but you really have to pressure test that. Yeah. I can imagine you really have to like think it through because if it is so easy to compete with a new technology,

on the commodity basis right away. I'm assuming the big incumbents would have a very high incentive to just gobble it up really quickly, your technology, right? If it is truly that simple. Certainly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go into, let's talk a little bit about politics. So a lot of people are very concerned about Trump and the White House changing to kind of a, let's call it a less than friendly environment to climate. And many people have heard different takes about what it will mean for the sector, but let's talk about what it specifically means for Travertine.

And I think this is interesting because you guys are playing across carbon capture, waste mitigation and chemical production. kind of what, what impact do you think overall Trump will have for, for your business? Yeah, it's a, it's a question that's on everybody's minds that are, are in the climate tech space right now. For us, we're also enabling on shoring of critical element production, which is paramount for national defense and which is a priority of the Republican party and of Trump. We're also, so.

I think that we have that really strong thing going for us as a company. We're also reducing waste, we're reducing environmental harm, and we're on children production and manufacturing. And those are incentives that I think cross party lines and cross even ideologies within parties. The fact that our revenue stack is not a hundred percent dependent on CDR and

that in fact, in the higher value products, the higher value application, CDR is a minority part of our revenue stack, that is also a really strong benefit for us as a business. the way that we look at it is on the long-term, we're building a strong business that's resilient to whatever party is in the White House. And I think that anybody that is in the climate tech space, it's not gonna get solved in two years or four years or even eight years.

So you have to think on the long term and you have to build a business that is going to be resilient to different changes in the market, in policy, in administrations, et cetera. I do think this is super important. And again, a lot of people are very upset about the outcome of the election for specifically for climate. But, my silver lining take is like, hopefully people will learn to be resilient, regardless of who is in the White House, because we can't, if we truly care about making an impact, you can't, you can't just have it one way, right? Because there is going to be.

cycles and it's going to flip back and forth every so often. So you have to be willing to build. And we have to focus on issues that are benefits to everybody, or at least it benefits to as most people as possible and get bipartisan support on board. So your overall, I guess, of take is positive or negative, or is it kind of just TBD? I think it is too soon to say. Yeah. And there too many things at play that we have no idea how they're going to play out. Yeah.

I would be curious. I'm not going to put you on the spot here, but I'd be curious if at any point your guys' branding changes because branding plays a huge role in who you get money from. So I'm always curious about that. Well, yeah, I think everybody's got to think about how they talk about what they're doing. Yeah, it is super important to talk about. I heard a lot of people with a take rip to the term climate tech. It's going to be energy abundance and...

on-shoring of industrial production or whatever the core would be. But we'll see. We'll see what will happen in the next four years. I'm sure we'll still end up finding a lot of wins. I guess one thing I'd like to ask is, maybe on the optimistic side, are there any potential upsides that you do see? Yeah. Well, I think the push to on-shore critical in production to permit mines that have gone through environmental review and that are good options to actually mine could be a really positive benefit for the US.

I think we do have to go back to the simple fact in every environmentalist that's remember this, that we need resources from the earth to live our life. I think the safest and the least environmentally harmful place in the world to do that is the US. so we should want to do more mining and more resource production in the US because we can do it the safest and the best way that has the least harm to the local environment. And I think that's something that

We really, as people that care about the earth and care about the environment have to remember is that we can't live here without earth's resources. And we just have to figure out how do we use earth's resources in the most sustainable and circular way possible. And certainly our technology is one of many ways of doing that. But we can't just say, we can't, we're not going to extract any resources in the US because they'll just get extracted elsewhere where more environmental harm and less safe conditions.

Yeah, I think there was a kind of reckoning, at least I felt that the shift, you said the vibe shift like a couple of years ago where people realized, yes, we got rid of fracking, but we were actually doing it in a relatively clean way. And now other places around the world are doing it they are not doing it in a clean way. So in the end, like it was actually a negative for the whole world, despite the US emissions numbers coming down. is a constant battle between local and global impacts and most people don't fight.

against their local impacts without thinking about the global impacts. And so it's part of the reason why we have a whole lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, right? Is we wanted power from coal and now we have CO2 in the atmosphere, right? And the power from coal locally and now we have CO2 in the atmosphere all over the world. And so it's a really important consideration when we're thinking about any technology, any industry, any environmental potential harm is

What is the global impact versus the local impact? On the CDR side of things, I know it's not your primary source of revenue, but I just am curious if you have, if there's any general like sentiment among your peers in that space, like what is going to look like? Cause a lot of people are very bearish on this for the next four years. Yeah. So I think on the long-term, everybody's a bit wait and see. I think that voluntary carbon removal market is still very strong and still supply constrained. So there's a lot of corporations that are

that still want to buy permanent carbon dioxide removal. I think over the next few years, that'll still be an important part of the industry. Actually today, a bipartisan carbon dioxide removal investment act is being introduced into Congress. And so this is an update to 45Q tax credit to make it more applicable to more innovations. The carbon removal alliance that we're a part of was a big part in getting that bill presented.

And so we'll see if that passes. And so I think on that front, we're a bit on the wait and see. One thing I will say is that the Trump administration threat to pull back unspent OCD money or OCED money is really bad. And I think it's frankly un-American. America is known as a place to do business because things are consistent. And when you know that there's going to be funding and that funding will be there. And I think...

that lack of consistency is bad overall for industry and businesses that want to build in the US. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that feedback there. One thing I really am curious about, because it seems as though Trevartine is doing this well, is within deep tech, lot of founders have a little bit of an attachment to their technology, right? They're like, you know, I made this, we have to do it this way. And Trevartine seems to be kind of just focused on the outcomes and the goals.

Do have any kind of words, if you will, on how founders can not be precious about their technology and focus on the outcomes? Yeah. So I've seen this in a couple of different companies throughout my career. And I think the important question for any company and any founder to ask is, what is your goal? And if your goal is to solve a problem, is your goal to solve a problem or is your goal to scale your technology that you came up with? And those are two entirely different things.

And so if your goal is to solve a problem for a customer or solve a problem in the environment and for a customer, then you're going to want to do that with the best technology available, regardless of if you came up with it. And you're also more likely to build a good business if that's, if that's your goal is solving actual problem. If your goal is to make your technology successful, you're probably going to miss its shortcomings. You may miss another better technology that could solve the problem better. And you're probably not going to end up with a very good business.

And so that's a really important question when you start out is what is your actual goal? And it's something that a lot of technology founders don't get is because they're enamored with their own technology and they want to make their technology work. So on Traverty, our process has been modified and improved since the day that it was a bench scale proof of concept in Laura's lab. And it's been improved by the amazing team that we've hired. And if we

If we find a better pathway or better technology to eliminate industrial waste and remove carbon, we will look at it and absolutely use it. And so I think, I think it's one of the amazing things about Laura as a technologist is that she's, she's not attached to her technology. She wants to solve the problem. and we as a company are focused on solving the problem and improving the buyer environment and building a really great business and a really great company. I think it's worth just kind of pointing out. There's a, there's.

Obviously, a lot of the big tech companies like Amazon and Metta have like people forget that they're not just based on a particular technology. Like it doesn't make any sense why Amazon would have AWS unless they were just kind of focused on broader solving problems, right? If they were just like, we're going to be, you know, the internet bookstore, they would have just been the internet bookstore and it would not be what it is today, right? So I think it's important for people to conceptualize that first kind of growth of tech in general. Well, it's not only that, but also if you think about

If you think about a technology coming out of a lab, for example, or technology getting developed, it's not the technology that builds the business. It's the people that build the business, and then it's the business that's actually successful. It's not the technology. The technology is table stakes, and then you have to go and build a great business around it. Yeah. One thing I think a lot of people could get some value from you is if you would be able to walk us through your kind of specific journey or the mechanics of how you funded your first projects. Yeah. So first projects or company and...

As a whole, first project specifically because people always talk about folk financing and a lot of people like what exactly is folks just talk about like what are the actual mechanics look like? How much of it was equity was any of it? Any any kind of grants, etc, etc. Yeah, so this demo plant that we're building with at Sabin metals site in outside Rochester, New York is a mix of grant funding and venture debt. And so we received a 3.2 million dollar grant from NYSERDA.

And that's a milestone based grant. So we don't have that money in, but as we hit milestones throughout the project, they will, they will pay us for those milestones. So was pre pre negotiated milestones. And then we received seven and a half million dollars in venture debt from builders vision. And they're a great one of the, one of the handful of amazing folk financing groups. And so those two things combined, 10.7 million dollars is more than enough for us to build this project.

So just let me clarify then, the grant you get after you achieve certain milestones, maybe some of it comes in kind of like little buckets, but you're saying that in order to fill in the gap between you had the venture debt that I'm assuming was you were able to achieve because you had the grant and then you use your equity to fund in the meantime before the grant pays out. Is that correct? Yeah. I think we were in negotiations for the NYSERDA grant while we were closing the venture debt. So that kind of happened in parallel.

The venture debt was aware of the NYSERDA grant, but it wasn't closed. so certainly for the early development of the project, we used equity dollars, but the bulk of the engineering, the equipment, the construction, all of that is coming from the grant and the venture debt. Were there any key pieces around achieving, like getting that venture debt that you had to have? Like, we had an offtake agreement or we had some other thing that was validated?

So we had to have an MLU for an offtake agreement of the sulfuric acid. We had to have a preliminary engineering design and we have to have a business model that they believed in beyond that. Got it. Okay. And then I guess speaking of funding of projects, one of the key things that people are concerned about with a Trump presidency, not to bring it back to that too much, but is the LPO, right? People are worried that the LPO will basically just become dormant or maybe fund nuclear projects, hopefully at least, but like...

If you were kind of to make the case to the Trump administration to keep the LPO going or to fund certain things that are in line with this kind of on-shoring of production agenda, what are some of those key points that you would make to them? Yeah. So I think it's first of all important to know that we can't just flip the switch and bring heavy industry and manufacturing back to the US. And tariffs also won't do that. They're just going make everything more expensive for Americans. And so if we think about

If we, we sort of step back and we think about, okay, what is America best at? America is best at innovation and innovation and industry takes time. doesn't happen instantly. It takes time and it takes money in the early days, but the long-term rewards are massive. And so look, I think America is already great.

And I think if we want to make it greater and we do, everybody wants to make it greater. That's going to take, that's a longer project than four years. And especially innovating and heavy industry is a long longer project than four years. So I think the message is really simple, which is just invest in our future by investing in innovation and keep the LPO going. The one thing I would maybe like add to, if I was going to help you make that argument is I would try to look back at all of the incredible technologies that came out of.

government funding specifically like back in the 50s and 60s. I'm pretty sure it's rumored that his uncle, Fred Trump, was somehow involved with some of these things and some of this technology development. A lot of this could not have happened. Nobody was going to fund the development of this weird technology that may or may not come to fruition. So if we want to have that of that boom and all that great stuff, we have to continue funding these things. Just do it in a smart way with America's objectives in mind, if you will.

Well, yeah, and the LPO is the loan program's office. It is a loan. It gets paid back. Yeah. And it can fund itself. I don't actually know the numbers on this. I should maybe try to get somebody on the pod to talk about this because I'm pretty sure that they tend to do pretty well with the returns overall. All right. Let's go to the one other topic that you brought up to me in our prep call was you kind of broke my frame by talking about how waste, CO2 is a waste. Okay.

And in the past, people just wasted, they threw stuff everywhere, but eventually we started to make them pay for that. kind of, if you were to make this case that we have to include CO2 in that waste stream that corporations or anybody who emits is required to pay, what would your case be for that? Whether you're making it to the EPA or to whatever administration is, how would you make that case? Yeah. Well, and so just talking about the frame, right? People think about CO2, it's in the atmosphere. And I think one of the...

one of the hesitations of why people are like, well, why do we need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is they don't see it as a waste, right? And it's not something that you can tangibly see, but that's exactly what it is. It's a waste from industry. And so if we look at the history of water, and I actually started my career as a hydrologist, the famous story is that in the Cuyahoga River that goes through Cleveland caught on fire. And today, if we think about a...

river catching on fire. We're okay, that's really bad. The crazy thing is, is that this wasn't the first time, it was like the 10th time that the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. But for some reason, that time, everybody was like, okay, this is really bad. It was also because many of the other rivers in the country were highly polluted and you couldn't swim in them. so that led to the forming of the EPA in 1970 and ultimately the Clean Water Act in 1972.

The main part of that was saying, okay, hey, there are limits to what you can admit and you have to pay to clean that up and you can't just admit anything that you want. And so that's pretty logical to us now, right? That an industry can't just go in their backyard and dump chemicals in the back. But that's literally what they used to do. And that's what I spent the first part of my career cleaning up is companies that had dumped their barrel of waste in their backyard.

And decades later, we had to spend millions of dollars to clean it up. So anyway, it's logical for us now. It's like you pay for trash, right? You pay for, pay to take out the trash. doesn't, you know, you can't just throw your trash on the ground, but it's not how we think of CO2. And so I think, and I think part of the problem is you can't immediately see CO2 in the atmosphere and you can't see the effects of it immediately. It's a much, it's it's a global problem. It's not something that you can clearly see. But.

It is a waste product and we have to pay for disposal for it. And the fact that we don't is essentially a subsidy to any carbon emitting company. if you think about small, if you also think about small government Republicans, they don't like subsidies. so you wouldn't want a subsidy for any industry, especially in established industry. So yeah, I think it's really a branding problem and

don't want to talk about a price on carbon or a tax on carbon or cap and trade or subsidies for carbon dioxide removal. I think we really should be focusing on, you should pay to remove your waste and there's a limit on the amount of waste that you can put in the atmosphere. So I think that's just simple, logical and fair. It makes a lot of sense. do think perhaps that you alluded to this, like the reason why it might be hard to convince people of that is because it doesn't seem

as directly correlated. But I think if you can just come up with enough examples and even just point to the past and say, listen, like we had no problem in, you know, in the sixties cleaning up the rivers because it was an issue. And now people are getting, you know, maybe connected to lung cancer or something you can do. Like you can point to highly polluted areas of the world where they definitely have issues. And you can even point to historically in the U S where there was like all these emissions before they cleaned up steel production, for example, right? Like

they cleaned it up themselves because their workers were dying. Right? So it's like, there's ways you can tie it together and say, let's make a common sense thing here. Let's just make it happen. Yeah. It's storytelling. And the power of a newspaper publishing the Cuyahoga River on fire was what really lit a fire under people to actually make some change. And now today, we enjoy clean water because of that.

Yeah. A lot of times the people who have it in their duty to protect their local constituents, like you say, small government Republicans, they want the industry to come there. They don't want to have regulations on them, but they're forgetting that there's long-term negative effects of these things. They're trying to focus on the economic growth initially and they forget about the long-term effects. Right. It's all about pricing in the long-term economic advantages. Yeah.

All right, let's get through a couple more things here. I think we can get through all my topic before we run out of time. Okay. Can you just walk us through your overall fundraising journey with Travertine and any of the core things you learned from that? Sure. In 2022, we raised the seed round funded by Clean Energy Ventures and the Grantham Foundation, $3.2 million seed round. were a couple of other smaller participants in that. We also got an SBIR grant from ARPE, so that's the division of the...

Department of Energy, so the $2 million grant. And so those two things kicked us off and allowed us to really start working on this project. And then recently we closed $8.5 million convertible note, which was led by Wholesome, the Swiss cement company I referenced earlier, and Clean Energy Ventures and Grant them participated in that. And then the $7.5 million venture debt and $3.2 million NYSERDA grant as well.

that are funding the project. It's right around $25 million. Yeah. And what would you say, are there any particular lessons that you guys learned from there or things that were challenging at the beginning and then you adjusted it and you had certain revelations, if you will? Yeah. Well, don't run out of money, number one. I think look at all the options. And then the other thing is that this kind of goes back to the typical technology, technology versus business,

What all the venture capitalists, venture capitalists generally sort of, assume your technology works, right? They assume that you are good at that and they assume that there is pathway to scale. They do their due diligence, but that's not the big thing that they're focused on. They're focused on, is there a business for this company? And most people don't focus on the business aspect early enough and figuring out what that business is because I can almost guarantee it.

you if you have a technology coming out of a lab or a new technology, what you think your business is going to be is not what your business ends up being. And so focusing on the business and focusing on what your go-to-market strategy is and talking to customers and making sure that you can show customer demand, that's the biggest, most important part of any fundraising journey. Okay. Got it. And then guess writ large in this, I don't know how you describe like the chemical space broadly, like are there any

broader macro trends like self-regulation or policy things that you see kind of happening? Well, we talk to people all over the world from in mining and fertilizer companies. Everybody was trying to figure out what to do with gypsum or phosphogypsum. It's a big problem in every single sector of the world from Australia to North Africa, to the Middle East, to Europe, to the Southeast of the US.

It is a, it's a massive problem and there's increasing regulatory pressure on that to, to actually change the way that we manage gypsum and fossil gypsum. so is the main reason that they care about it now because of the regular regulatory pressure, or is it just because it's been around so long that they're starting to see the, the buildup? It's It's, it's different in different regions. Some, some it's regulatory pressure. Some it's that these they're running out of room on these stacks and need to something else.

And so, yes, it's a variety of pressures that are contributing to it. It's always fascinating to see how there is a problem in the future that just hasn't really surfaced to the observer yet because they haven't seen the buildup long enough or whatever. I think this is a really fascinating problem to think about. I mean, one of the things that we go about our typical day and we live our life and we...

generally don't see the waste products or the problems that us becoming an industrialized nation caused. And we're now at point where we can rethink all of that and make a much more circular economy and use byproducts or things that used to be thought as waste as byproducts and as actual feedstocks for new processes. And it's a pretty exciting time because we get to rethink all of that.

This is the whole reason I got super interested in climate in the first place. You tell me that there are probably thousands of waste things that we could turn into real products. This is awesome. I was just so, so mind blown. I wasn't even convinced of the climate piece yet. I was like, this is so cool to be part of this new industrial revolution. That's for me what got me interested in the first place. But let's try to wrap up here with a couple really rapid fire questions. Who is a climate founder that you feel is underrated? Well, okay. I'll give you an example locally.

At a climate tech potluck here in Boulder, just met a guy, Eric Smith, who was the founder and CEO of wind turbine, wind turbine tower company, Keystone Towers, I think it was called. And they basically came up with this method for spiral welding wind turbine towers and allows them to make them taller, wind turbines taller than ever before. And they manufacture on site at a wind farm and they, I believe they got acquired sometime in the last year.

I'd never heard of them before, but they made a huge impact on the wind industry. And it's a really cool niche, but super valuable product that has moved the wind industry forward. That's really interesting. So you're saying they can just avoid having to haul everything in, they can do it on site? Yeah. Well, so the limitation previously apparently was just constraints on transporting these towers over the road. So they could only be so thick or only be so wide.

And with a different technique, you could manufacture them on site and eliminate that constraint and get them taller and cheaper. Got it. Okay. Yeah, that is pretty fascinating. I love these tiny things that have huge impacts. Is there any specific climate resource that you'd like to shout out and why? I would just say industry experience. And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of people that sort of want to get into climate tech and do something in climate tech or coming maybe from the software industry.

as an example and get industry experience, right? If you want to disrupt an industry, understand what that industry is doing first. And so it's really hard to make progress in changing how things are done if you don't know how they're done at first. And everything that we're going to do in climate tech is about physical things. And it's a lot more complicated and time consuming than building software products as an example.

Yeah. I always feel bad telling somebody with three years of BCG experience that you might have to go work somewhere else before you can do a huge thing. mean, not that you can't do it, but the people who've worked in some industry for 20 years who come over to climate, they have a huge impact they can make, Totally. Well, yeah, if you want to make an impact in how we extract earth resources, working in mining is the number one way to go figure that out, right?

And then last thing, what is a book that you've read or something that you've consumed kind of content wise that has really influenced you throughout your life or your career? I'd say one of the books is, I've been in environmental companies for a long time before I first worked in renewable energy. And when I was entering renewable energy, I read The Grid and The Grid is just an amazing book about the history and the current challenges with the US grid.

And if you want to understand, it's a big part of us decarbonizing and electrifying is understanding the grid. And one of the things that really stood with me is that the number one reason for power outages in the U S is squirrels. Squirrels getting blown up in transformers. Yeah. Wow. That is, that is wild. All right, man. Well, this has been, I think one of our most value packed episodes. know we're slightly over on time here, but any last things you want to offer the audience? No, I, you know, feel free to reach out if you want to chat and.

I think there's a lot of exciting things going on in the climate tech space and it's an exciting time to get industry experience, to work for climate tech startups and yeah, thanks for hosting a great podcast. Absolutely, man. Thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom. This has been a pleasure.