Catalyst with Shayle Kann

The good news: The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) contains more nickel and cobalt than the rest of the world’s land-based reserves combined. It also has significant resources of high-grade lithium, copper and rare earth metals—all of which are critical for the batteries the world needs to meet Paris Agreement targets. The bad news: The CCZ lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and contains biodiv...

Carbon capture and storage. It’s a controversial tool in the energy transition that we don’t want to use, but probably have to. Most of the scenarios in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report include capturing and storing hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide between now and 2100.  When people say carbon capture and storage, or CCS, they often mean different things. It’s a term that covers multiple t...

Before hydrogen makes it big, we have to overcome a massive, ocean-sized challenge: Transporting the fuel between continents.  The places that will be best suited to produce hydrogen via renewables-powered electrolysis, like Australia and Egypt, will have to ship that hydrogen to demand centers in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere. And it turns out that shipping hydrogen is way harder than shipping oil...

More than a third of the world’s current greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels go through underground networks of fungi, according to a new peer-reviewed study in Current Biology. That’s a whopping 13 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. Mycorrhizal fungi act as a symbiotic partner of plants, seeking out nutrients and bringing them back to the plants’ roots. In return, they accept...

Everything, everywhere, all at once—that’s the state of the U.S. solar industry right now. Suppliers are rushing to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous domestic-manufacturing incentives. Major manufacturers like First Solar and Enel have announced billion dollar investments in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma and Lawrence County, Alabama. But tariffs on the import of some Chinese-m...

The list of potential uses for AI in climatetech is growing fast: developing better materials, optimizing solar farms, integrating renewables and microgrids. But many of these are still theoretical. We wanted to find a real-world application that changed the way we make climatetech. So we decided to come up with our own test run. Back in March Duncan Campbell, vice president at Scale Microgrids, u...

Voluntary carbon credits are a lot like used cars; you really have no idea what their quality might be. Or maybe they’re more like expensive bottles of wine. Most people (or at least Shayle) can’t tell if they’re buying good quality wine. If it’s expensive, it must be good, right? That’s the logic that has plagued voluntary carbon markets for years.  A carbon credit can work in two ways. First, it...

The energy transition is fueling skyrocketing demand for copper, an essential metal for renewables, batteries, and other climatetech. But supply isn’t keeping up. There’s more than enough copper in the earth’s known reserves to supply our growing demand for the metal, but supply is stagnating due to rising extraction costs and decades-long lead times to open new mines. A July 2022 report from S&P...

Are you a utility or climatetech startup looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape your company? Come to our one-day event, Transition-AI: Boston, on June 15. Our listeners get a 20% discount with the code PSPODS20. On the Catalyst with Shayle Kann podcast this week: The good news: the U.S. has about 47 days’ worth of energy stored up for later use. The bad news? Virtually all o...

Are you a utility or climate tech startup looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape your company? Come to our one-day event, Transition-AI: Boston on June 15. Our listeners get a 20% discount with the code PSPODS20. Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the EPA’s first attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. But it also preserved the EPA’s author...

Depending on who you talk to, Bitcoin mines are either great for the grid or the worst thing that’s ever happened to it. These warehouses of computers essentially turn electricity into bitcoins. Proponents argue that mines can do a number of things for the grid, like: Support grid reliability by reducing demand during peak hours Incentivize new renewable generation by raising the prices that solar...

The U.S. power grid is clogged, and it’s holding back the energy transition.  Solar and wind farms are waiting four or more years to connect to the grid. Rising congestion costs are driving up retail electricity prices while hurting generator revenues. And the process of approving projects for interconnection is so complicated and expensive that it’s forcing developers to abandon the projects they...

We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. It’s about a rogue startup that was trying to do something we’ve talked about on this show: solar geoengineering.  Last year, Time staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can.  Luke Iseman...

Hydropower is the world’s largest source of renewable electricity today, according to the IEA. Like gas peaker plants, it’s highly dispatchable, meaning it can complement intermittent renewables like wind and solar.  And we could get a lot more of it. The IEA estimates that we could double the amount of energy produced globally. One peer-reviewed study found that global economic potential for hydr...

The battery manufacturing announcements have been coming one after another—a VW cathode facility in Canada; a Tesla factory in Mexico; a Ford battery plant in Michigan. These companies hope to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s lucrative EV tax credits: Up to $3,750 for strategic minerals mined in the U.S. or its many free trade partner countries Up to $3,750 for battery components pr...

The run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) earlier this month was a hair-raising experience for anyone in climatetech. The bank catered to entrepreneurs in tech, especially climate. So when news of SVB’s troubled assets hit social media, startups scrambled to withdraw millions of dollars and draft emergency plans to make payroll. But after the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC) took over SVB a...

Landfills, dairy farms and wastewater plants all emit methane, the potent greenhouse gas produced when organic material decomposes in the absence of oxygen.  But instead of emitting that methane (often called biomethane or waste methane), it’s possible to capture and refine it, resulting in renewable natural gas, or RNG. Capturing methane that would have been emitted anyway (something that’s still...

Nitrous oxide or N2O is the third largest source of GHG emissions behind carbon dioxide and methane. Also known as laughing gas, it’s long-lived like carbon dioxide and incredibly potent like methane. And it accounts for about 6% of global warming.  So where does it come from? And what do we do about it? In this episode, Shayle talks to Eric Davidson, professor at the University of Maryland Center...

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. I host the show and we did an episode recen...

Last year’s surge in oil prices brought record windfall profits for oil majors, and a boon for investors. But historic trends don’t favor fossil fuels. From 2010 to 2020, the oil & gas sector underperformed the broader S&P 500 index. The sector gained 6% over that period, while the benchmark S&P index grew 180%. Some called it a "lost decade" for fossil fuel investors. “If anything, oil's been a d...

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts on April 6 with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. We had so much to cover in Nat Bullard’s monster climate trends deck that we’re back for another episode. Haven’t heard the first part yet? Listen here.  Nat was the chief content o...

It’s the first year of what we hope is an annual event: Nat Bullard has released his first climate trends report. He was the chief content officer at BloombergNEF until last year, and now is a senior contributor at BNEF and Bloomberg Green. He’s also a venture partner at Voyager Ventures.  There’s so much in this 141-slide deck that we’ve split the conversation into two episodes. In this first par...

Recent announcements in the world of nuclear power might make you think that new nuclear technologies are close to deployment in North America. But look closely and you’ll find that progress is actually painfully slow, weighed down by regulatory challenges. Today’s guest argues that all those rules and regulations need to be overhauled. In this episode, Shayle talks to Bret Kugelmass, CEO and foun...

Recent research has raised questions about the global-warming impact of uncombusted hydrogen. When it leaks from storage, pipes and other infrastructure into the atmosphere, new studies suggest hydrogen absorbs more heat than previously understood. And, perhaps more importantly, it extends the atmospheric life of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Proponents argue that hydrogen is a critical climat...

It’s that time of year when we reach into our listener mailbag and answer your questions. And you had some good ones. In this episode, Shayle once again hands the mic to guest host Sarah Golden, VP of energy at GreenBiz Sarah Golden. Together they cover things like: The role of biology in creating fossil-fuel-free materials Whether the marginal cost of electricity is heading toward zero Solving th...