An interview with Adam Wolf, co-founder of Eion Carbon, which calls its product 'Nature's Carbon Lock™ Solution.'
Benjamin Schulz: When did you found the company, and what’s the origin story behind Eion?
It’s as though we’ve got sub-prime mortgages where we’ve spent the money, we want to know where the asset is, and then, we discover ten years later that not only is there no asset, but we’ve wasted a decade. It struck me that there’s a way to form a company that leverages what I learned and tries a new path towards scaling. But ultimately, if we’re talking about carbon, it’s built around the unique process of this particular mineral and its supply chain. Everything about it just has nothing in common with a SaaS company.
By chance, I was on a Congressional roundtable about the future of work in rural America, and one of the other members was a CEO of a trade industry that represents farmer-owned cooperatives. This gentlemen — who happened to be a former Secretary of Agriculture — is spending a lot of time thinking about the future of work. He was able to clarify for us the prominent role that co-ops play, both as the trusted advisor but also distributor.
If we’re just thinking about soil organic carbon, there are a few issues. Obviously, everybody agrees that more soil carbon is better for soil health and has all these eco-system benefits. However, as a monetizable asset, it’s subject to a lot of uncertainty. It’s reversible. It’s hard to measure it reliably, even in the same place over time. In my former life, I was a scientist and collected all these soil data so I know how it works. It’s just sort of hard to do a good job at it.
When silicates are pulverized and added to agricultural soils, they dissolve to remove CO2 permanently and irreversibly Now our rock, it’s interesting, is three hundred million years old. This is a silicate. If I was to give it to you, you’d say wow, this is kind of heavy. In fact, it’s usually found in the mantle, so if we look at our earth, we’ve got the crust, the mantle starts around 60 kilometers below. It’s dense. In fact, this is crazy. What I’m holding here is a meteorite.
Adam Wolf: This is an area that was really essential for us to understand. Once these minerals are dissolved; it becomes part of the hydrological cycle because the carbon dioxide into solution is dissolved inorganic carbon or DIC. It ends up in the ground water, it goes into rivers, and rivers empty into the ocean – there’s huge literature on that topic. When it ends up in the ocean, it lingers for around 3,000 years as this dissolved inorganic carbon before it is calcified.
Adam Wolf: The numbers, the milestones, this is an interesting question. We have our bottom-up strategy, where let’s say we get to a hundred thousand tons next year, half a million tons in a couple of years. If we’re talking about a gravel quarry, which is basically what we’re talking about, that’s 100% achievable. It’s not scary to anyone in terms of managing that scale of process. But in some ways, that’s not fast enough.
I think before I started, my leading idea for what I was going to do, is to start a perfume company. It sounds crazy. There’s a company in California, where I grew up, called Juniper Ridge, that essentially has a van, they go to National Forests, with permission, and they take the slash piles of juniper and spruce, and they distill it and put it in a bottle. I brought up a bottle to show. These are the smells I grew up with. And then I moved out east, to a different group of smells.
Adam Wolf: Picture what we’re doing is in the space that might be called carbon utilization. I saw today that someone makes vodka made from carbon removed from the atmosphere. Or somebody else is making a plastic. There are products that you can make that people attach value to and will pay money for. I think this is an underappreciated dividing line between different corners of the carbon removal economy because we’re actually doing something that has yield benefits.
The difficult part is going from one ton to a thousand tons to a hundred thousand tons. Those are each different scales, and we have to move every ton. The rock we’re working with removes about one ton of CO2 per ton of rock, and there’s no escaping the fact that to remove one ton of CO2, you have to move one ton of rock. Even five feet that you did not account for is insurmountable.
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