Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Editor’s note: In honor of all the frying oil used this Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, on the possibilities and perils of using biowaste for biofuels. Since it was published in June 2022, there has been increasing investment in biofuels from oil majors, especially for sustainable aviation fuel. Biomass. It's the organic matter in f...

Shayle and his team at Energy Impact Partners (EIP) review a lot of climate-tech pitches. The best kind of pitch uses a solid techno-economic analysis (TEA) to model how a technology would compete in the real world. In a previous episode, we covered some of the ways startups get TEAs wrong — bad assumptions, false precision, focusing on parts instead of the system, etc. So what does a good TEA loo...

Oh, the heat pump — a climate tech darling that still hasn’t hit the big time yet. One challenge for heat pumps is that the customer experience can be difficult, involving a complex installation process, poor installation jobs, and even technicians that don’t want to sell you one. What’s it going to take to get heat pumps right?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Paul Lambert, founder and CEO of th...

The bad news: The refrigerants we use in air conditioners, fridges, and vehicles absorb hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide does. The good news: We’re in the middle of a global effort to replace them with lower impact alternatives.  Will we replace them fast enough to hit climate targets? And in the meantime, can we prevent them from leaking into the atmosphere? In this ep...

This might be our wonkiest topic yet: Techno-economic analysis, or TEA.  Before a startup proves its technology is commercially viable, it models how a technology would work. These TEAs include things like assumptions about inputs, prices, and market landscape. They help investors and entrepreneurs answer the question, will this technology compete? TEAs are important to the success of an early-sta...

We capture concentrated methane emissions from point sources like dairy barns, landfills, and coal mines. Mitigating methane emissions is essential to hitting net-zero targets, but could we capture diluted gasses straight from the atmosphere, too?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Gabrielle Dreyfus, Chief Scientist at the Institute For Governance & Sustainable Development, about a National Aca...

AI is enabling a multitude of solutions across power, industry, and transportation. But AI energy demands are increasingly stressing the electric grid — creating a bottleneck for growth and new challenges for clean energy supply. The mounting tension highlights the need for an energy-first approach to computing.  Developer Crusoe is building AI infrastructure that takes advantage of clean energy t...

Getting the construction industry to try a novel form of cement is like turning a giant ship. It’s hard to redirect the immense momentum behind existing ways of doing business, especially involving cement, the most energy-intensive ingredient in concrete. Industry insiders point to tight margins, concerns about messing with the ingredients that literally hold up buildings, and the long list of sta...

Chinese battery companies are manufacturing the cheapest cells in the world right now, and it’s not just because of cheap labor and state subsidies. They’ve streamlined the process in a way that has industry experts wondering how international competitors can ever catch up. In this episode, Shayle talks to James Frith, principal at the battery investment firm Volta Energy Technologies. He argues t...

Tannice McCoy grew up in a mining family, but she never imagined herself in the mining business. Today she’s the president and general manager of NewRange Copper Nickel. Jenna Lehti never imagined herself in the mining industry either. She’s a member of the Bois Forte band of the Ojibwe tribe in Northern Minnesota, and grew up on a reservation adjacent to the Iron Range, a collection of mining dis...

The world’s first large-scale, commercial direct-air capture (DAC) plants are coming online – or are about to. How soon will we see a boom in high-quality, durable DAC supply?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Andreas Aepli, chief financial officer of Climeworks, the world’s largest provider of DAC. They talk about Climeworks’ challenges with its two commercial plants – the kinds of challenges And...

Editor’s note: There’s some big money flowing into low carbon ammonia right now. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1.56 billion conditional loan guarantee for Wabash Valley Resources, an Indiana low-carbon ammonia facility. In August, oil and gas producer Woodside Energy spent $2.35 billion on a low-carbon ammonia plant in Texas. Both of these facilities will produce low-carbon...

The U.S. and U.K. could see 500 gigawatts of distributed resources hitting the power system in the next few years.  But after years of watching DERs grow quickly, utilities and grid operators are still figuring out how to utilize them. Are we finally reaching an inflection point? “When you move to a world where you have millions and millions of generators, that whole system falls apart. And that's...

AI is working its way across climate tech, helping companies discover giant lodes of ore, catch battery defects, and monitor energy infrastructure. Could it help us find revolutionary new materials, too? Turns out, it’s complicated.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Ekin Dogus Cubuk, or Dogus, a researcher focused on materials at Google DeepMind. DeepMind is one of several players, including Micro...

Deploy or innovate? Scale up an existing technology or develop a breakthrough? Build, build, build, or invent a better mousetrap? The question isn’t which strategy to follow; it’s which strategy to use in which sector. Virtually no one thinks that solar needs brand new tech breakthroughs to scale. Crystalline silicone took the lion’s share of the market years ago from cadmium telluride, amorphous...

Cutting emissions is essential to avoiding the worst of climate change, but we also have to deal with the impacts of climate change happening now. Fortunately, there’s a growing list of technologies that could help us adapt — and potentially turn a profit for investors, too. Will these emerging adaptation and resilience (A&R) technologies take off as an investment category? In this episode, Shayle...

Oil producers waste a lot of natural gas. Last year they flared 150 billion cubic meters of associated gas into the atmosphere, equivalent to about half the global carbon emissions of aviation over a 30-year period. So why are oil producers burning a valuable commodity like gas? In this episode, Shayle talks to Tomás de Oliveira Bredariol, an energy and environmental policy analyst focused on meth...

Hydrogen has two big problems: cost and supply. As a low-carbon feedstock, it could decarbonize planes, industry, and power plants. It could even replace the oil in plastics and chemicals. But the leading contenders for low-carbon hydrogen production — like using zero-carbon power for electrolysis and methane pyrolysis — just haven’t cut it yet. So far, the price points are too high and the scale...

Editor’s note: There’s new interest in nuclear power from electric utilities, the White House, and the public. While NuScale’s deal to build a small modular reactor failed last year, TerraPower is currently building the U.S.’s first advanced non-light water reactor in Wyoming. So we’re revisiting an episode from last November with The Good Energy Collective’s Dr. Jessica Lovering unpacking one of...

America’s green bank – officially known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – is ramping up. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government is sending $27 billion to a network of non-profit organizations, state green banks, and local private lenders to fund distributed energy projects.  The pressure is on to invest those dollars quickly and efficiently. The GGRF won’t be considered...

Editor’s note: There’s momentum behind permitting reform in the U.S. Congress right now. It could mean unstopping a serious bottleneck in climate tech — transmission. So we’re revisiting an episode from last May with Grid Strategies’ Rob Gramlich to understand how we got here, the impacts on climate tech, and the potential fixes.  The U.S. power grid is clogged, and it’s holding back the energy tr...

Little-known fact: The primary product of steel mills is CO2. A conventional blast furnace produces almost two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel. And with almost two billion tons of steel produced annually — roughly 500 pounds for every human, every year — that’s a lot of carbon: about 8% of global energy system emissions. And yet, steel is vital for vast parts of the economy, includin...

Automakers got ahead of their skis. EV sales are up globally and in the U.S., but growth has been slower than expected and uneven. After enjoying a wave of growth driven by early adopters, automakers overestimated demand of more cautious consumers and ended up producing more than buyers wanted. Now auto dealers are slashing prices to move cars off the lot. So how did the market get here? And how c...

In March, Nvidia announced a new microchip designed for AI that is 25 times more energy efficient than its predecessor. Two months later, Google announced one with a 67% efficiency improvement. Today, the rest of the semiconductor industry is hyper focused on efficiency gains. Will they save us from ballooning data center energy demands? In this episode, Shayle talks to Christian Belady, former Mi...

While we were all at home during Covid desperately trying to get our hands on toilet paper, exercise equipment, and home furnishings, solar executives like Dan Shugar were trying to get steel and power electronics to massive PV farms under development. As equipment and workforce disruptions spiraled due to lockdowns, the cost of installed solar started going up for the first time in nearly a decad...