People are pursuing direct carbon capture technology, which extracts carbon from the air and water and turns it into things such as gasoline.
Rob McGinnis recently moved to Santa Cruz and now drives around town in a VW Golf with a rack for a surfboard on top. Like many automobiles, the car is both a form of transportation and a way for its owner to communicate some vital part of his identity. “I used to drive a Tesla Roadster,” he said. ”But now I’m making gasoline cool again.”
Almost immediately after the U.N. report, the renowned early-stage investment firm Y Combinator made a show of calling for new companies working on carbon removal. The firm, famous for its role in nurturing software companies such as Airbnb Inc., Dropbox Inc. and Stripe Inc., said it was interested in projects that were “risky, unproven, even unlikely to work” and suggested exotic ideas, such as building huge reservoirs in the desert stocked with genetically modified phytoplankton.
This was exactly the sort of thing people wanted to hear, according to Gustaf Alströmer, a Y Combinator partner who’s working on its carbon project. “If you say, ‘I’m making gasoline,’ even if there’s a one in 500 or one in 1,000 chance it actually works, you will resonate very well with investors,” he said. Within weeks, McGinnis had raised enough money to hire several people and begin planning to move beyond a single prototype machine.
McGinnis’ breakthrough struck Matt Eisaman, an assistant professor in the engineering department at Stony Brook University, whose research had been the basis of an effort by Google X to create fuel from seawater. The two-year project, which ended in 2016 and was dubbed Foghorn, succeeded in making fuel. But Google nixed it anyway because it saw no clear path to make its product at competitive prices.
McGinnis, of course, is considerably more bullish. He predicts he’ll be selling a small amount of gasoline by next year in the $3-per-gallon range. McGinnis acknowledges that reaching a scale vast enough to make a difference in the climate remains dauntingly expensive. He estimates that it would cost $800 billion to replace the U.S. gasoline market with carbon-neutral fuel. But there’s no need to wait.
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