Carbon Removal’s Real Bottleneck Isn’t Technology. It’s Demand.

just to give a little bit of context about what graphite is and what we do.

So we're a durable carbon removal company.

That means we're taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a way that is directly measurable and keeping that carbon dioxide from returning to the atmosphere for very long periods of time.

So that's sort of what is known as durable carbon removal.

In graphite's case, we're We are basically letting plants, so the vegetation naturally captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

Unfortunately, most of that carbon dioxide captured by those plants returns back to the atmosphere when those plants simply die or decompose.

And so what we're doing is working with the industries that grow plants for a living, think agriculture and timber industries, taking their byproducts, again, that material contains roughly 50% carbon, and effectively introducing a series of engineering steps to ensure that the carbon captured by plants does not return to the atmosphere.

And what problem did you see in the carbon removal space that made you think that graphite was necessary?

Yeah, it's a great question.

So in the carbon removal space, as you may know, you basically got two ends of the spectrum.

On one end of the spectrum, you have what are called nature-based solutions.

This is often planting of a plant of some variety, right? So think in the agriculture context of growing a cover crop, for example.

That's one end of the spectrum, the nature-based end of the spectrum.

The benefit of that end of the spectrum is that you're letting sunlight power your carbon capture device, i.e. a plant.

The challenge of that end of the spectrum, again, nature-based solutions, is you never are quite certain how much carbon has been captured or for what duration.

So think of that just for a moment as the nature-based end of the carbon removal spectrum.

Now go to the other end of the spectrum, what is often called engineered capture.

carbon removal and kind of the classic example here is direct air capture.

And in that case, you've built a machine.

That machine requires a lot of energy input to separate carbon dioxide from atmospheric air.

Once that CO2 is separated from atmospheric air, you store it generally in a geologic reservoir and so in that case you've got good permanence it's going into a geologic reservoir you have good measurability but it's very significant very expensive right and also very energy intensive so those are the two ends of the spectrum and what graphite is looking to do is effectively be a hybrid solution getting the best of both worlds so in our case we're letting plants capture co2 naturally through photosynthesis again we're taking the byproducts of agriculture and timber And we're using engineering to effectively ensure that that carbon captured by those plants does not return to the atmosphere.

So that's the reason is you could see the two ends of the spectrum.

They have positives, right? Different positives and different ends of the spectrum, but they also have drawbacks.

And so what graphite, basically what we set out to do is to take the best of both of those worlds and graphite.

effectively create a low-cost, highly durable carbon removal solution in a process that we now call carbon casting.