Carbon Limit - CDR Innovator Interview

‍What is Carbon Limit?

Tim Sperry - Carbon Limit is a climate tech company in South Florida. We're on a mission to reach the gigaton scale. To do that, we're creating and commercialising the most sustainable technologies for the built environment, specifically concrete, and we've started this mission by creating our new technology, CaptureCrete. It's a simple additive that you add to concrete, giving it the ability to capture and store CO2 directly from the air, allowing us to quantify a lower carbon footprint. Built environment projects also generate carbon credits, and the value proposition is that you have something great you're doing on the sustainability side and the carbon credits we share with our large customers. So, we are creating a profitable business that is sustainable.

Inspirations

What was the inspiration that led to your carbon removal business?

Tim Sperry - We pivoted right in the middle of a TechStars program. We've always been into carbon climate tech and solutions that would help the environment. Three of our team members and I exited our previous climate tech company and started Carbon Limit on a mission to find a way to reach the gigaton scale. Still, everything pivoted when we entered our TechStars program and went through Mentor Madness. If anyone's familiar with Techstars, it's wild: 90 mentors two weeks straight, a 10-minute break between each one. Just non-stop. At that time, as we were pitching our business and hearing all this feedback, we pivoted from our original idea, which was a portable DAC system and, took the technology out of there and found a way to put it into concrete. It's a little more complicated than that, but it sounds easy. So that kicked us off, and we figured we're into the concrete business, which emissions are one of the biggest problems, and we're turning that big problem into a solution.

Milestones

In terms of the timings of that journey. Can you give us a few milestones from when this happened?

Tim Sperry -  When we created our DAC unit, we had this active mineral inside there, which took that scrubber material out and reformulated it with another active material that was able to replace some cement, which makes up some of the bigger carbon footprint associated with concrete, the glue that holds it together. That was an extensive process. We had to create a commercial and MVP test to ensure it worked and functioned like regular concrete. Iterations and iterations went through the lab. Once we found that this works as concrete, we asked, 'Does it capture CO2?' and 'Is there a net addition?' So a big part of this process, and what we spent the last two and a half years doing, was getting ASTM specifications similar to your standards, slightly different from those in Europe, and validating the carbon credits. That was a massive crossing of the chasm because many people listening and reading may understand that all these new technologies don't necessarily fit into one category, and we ellipse two categories. We're a DAC and a carbon mineralisation technology combined in one solution. So with these novel hybrid technologies, it's not the easiest thing in the world to quantify it and find an easy way to combine two new technologies, and then, for us, it was getting the IP. We can also then license it because we're also unique. We initially made this material and put it into a Google project. Then, we did a Department of Transportation project. We will be the first to say we are not a material company and don't make materials efficiently. We make technology. We wanted IP to license our formula to cement and concrete producers. That way, we say, 'Here's our formula, don't steal it from us.' But because you have our formula, you can generate carbon credits under our umbrella, and we provide the semantic concrete manufacturers with the formula. They make carbon-capturing concrete with CaptureCrete, and then we generate and issue carbon credits, which we sell and share the revenues. So we're unique in a couple of Senses. So, it was a lot to get to this point.

Tech Breakthroughs

Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your business's journey that left you especially excited about its potential?

Tim Sperry - That moment was when we got our first lab test back, and it showed baseline carbon capture and then CaptureCrete carbon capture, and we're like, my god, it works. Before that, it was theoretical. You assume, hope, and pray, and you're putting things together that have never been done before. That was pretty inspiring, and it was a big moment for us because it just gave us even more of a boost and more of an inspiration to continue going and then to understand that we're putting carbon capture into one of the biggest polluters and the second most used material on the planet is concrete. So what if all of our concrete captured CO2? The potential is there for a good time, and that's inspiring. We were on a site visit to validate another project. The first project we did with the Department of Transportation had the following kind of moment of inspiration and excitement: we walked on the expressway that was paved with CaptureCrete, and we're like, wow, we're walking on our project out there that cars are driving on.

Attracting Investment

What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?

Tim Sperry - Three obvious things: affordability, adaptability, and scalability. Our technology doesn't need a big piece of new equipment at a symmetric concrete facility; you're adding this, you would add another addition to the concrete design mix. We learned that people would be interested in licensing the technology because many of them are asking, ‘Where can I source it?’ ‘Where can I get it?’ but the Interest in adopting our technology and wanting to take on our formula and make carbon-capturing concrete with CaptureCrete was a great surprise and exciting for us. So, we've seen that we found a much easier road to adoption because we have an easily adoptable technology that doesn't need extra equipment and could be theoretically integrated overnight. I think just by getting some of those main dominoes to fall in, the rest of the dominoes will follow. Then investors love it too. 

Scalability

How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?

Tim Sperry - We're working on a solid, duplicable foundation in the States. Also, with the ASTM specifications met, it's easy for us to get spec'd into projects, and it's easier for them to adopt with a little bit of a risk there. So we want to solidify the foundation of this licensing protocol, how we work with the customers, how we do a site visit, and make sure that they're integrating properly, storing, and making it properly so that way when it gets time to generate those carbon credits, we have everything we need, and they're doing things according to specific protocols of the Carbon methodology. We're working under what we see moving forward because the Middle East has been very interested in our technology. They also work under ASTM specifications, at least where we've been going. So that's very helpful to us. We're looking at some of the giga projects out there and negotiating and working on some things that way, which would be very exciting and take us into the MENA region and Europe as well. We have some specifications that will need to meet their standards, which could take a little time. We see a considerable interest in setting up that process in Latin America as well. Then into Canada's also, so we're focused on getting a significant number of licenses and different regions here in the States and then emulating this out, going into the Middle East, going into Europe and hopefully Latin America later this year. On the same lines as that biochar side of the equation, we see that you also have a lot of the younger generation taking over for the older generation, and they're very much in line with sustainability, carbon reduction, and everything around it, they're more willing to adopt new technologies as long as you can prove their risk and the value props. We need to show them to them as clearly that one, we're making a concrete product as good or better, and two, we can quantify the reductions, and three, we have a carbon credit or something that will provide a financial return to them. We're effectively sharing carbon credit revenues. In the future, we'll share the carbon credits, as companies will need those. So we're preparing our business for both sides of that equation, but they all need to know there's a clear value prop how we're risking it, and then it depends on if there's a changing of the guards in some of these legacy industries. Even the older generations are picking it up. Still, it's because their competitors are picking it up and winning all the bids or all the jobs. After all, we have a sustainable solution, and they don't, so we're at the significant intersection of incentives, customer-driven and industry-driven demands. Although it's relatively new and pretty nuanced, we found ourselves in a great space. It's snowballing, and there are pros and cons.

Utilisation

Is Capturecrete mainly used in roads, or is it used in buildings as well?

Tim Sperry - It could be used in both. We can use it in poured precast concrete blocks. The one thing we're still getting as we get our durability test and our other tests that will quantify that last use case is a rebar-reinforced vertical structure. We still have calendar days and months to get those results back and confidently provide them. We don't see that there's an issue, but we want to be a hundred per cent sure; we don't want to end up putting, let's say, we're in 90% of the use case in that last 10% is just the rebar reinforced structure. We want to ensure that we're 100% confident that we can risk it and provide actual proof of what we're looking for. But, a lot of built environment projects here in South Florida and around here are made with concrete blocks, which don't touch rebar; you can also use alternatives for rebar which are cleaner like fibreglass and basalt rebar, and we don't have any issue going in there. So there are use cases to get around that one big skyscraper use case, but that's our last kind of use case hurdle that we're working on getting over. Generally, the concrete has to have some exposure, whether to soil, ambient air, or even inside air, but once you cover it and it's an impenetrable barrier, you will stop that uptake and freeze the concrete. Many buildings with Precast blocks or blocks made out of facility sit in the yard for a month or two, and that's pulling it all in at that time. So, from the day of making the concrete, it starts pulling in the CO2. We find that sometimes the sponge, the concrete itself that's pulling in the CO2, will saturate anywhere from nine months to 12 months; a thick poor for a roadway or an Airport runway could take longer because of the amount of concrete that it would need to go through to get there. We're seeing a lot of CO2 being captured over the first six to eighteen and up to 24 months.

Industry Challenges

What's the biggest challenge your business is facing in 2024, and what do you think is required to solve it?

Tim Sperry - The sales cycle for us has been a lot longer than we had anticipated; there's a pilot project and testing section of our fail cycle for a symmetric concrete company as a licensee. We need to test to make sure the performance works. We need to have the concrete sit outside compared to the baseline; how much CO2 is being captured? We do accelerated testing where we inject CO2 into a chamber with the control baseline and without the CaptureCrete in there, the sales cycle is longer than we would like it. As we move along, we will shorten that sales cycle. That's one of the biggest hurdles because it does slow down some of that adoption. But as we get enough rods in the fire, we'll likely turn those around quicker than we anticipate. Also, we will see more significant interest in selling more credits than we're already projecting to make, so we need to hurry up and get those new licensees on board to get those new projects going so we can fulfil them. Those are our two big hurdles this year.

Risks

What risks, from an industry perspective, should we be aware of in the next 18 months if we are to see the scale necessary to hit 2030 targets? It’s just 24 business quarters away.

Tim Sperry - It's the rate of adoption in our industry. That's one of the biggest components. For us, we're ready. We're constantly working on optimising our technology to increase the amount of CDR per ton of concrete; the data adoption rate will be critical in driving. It's ramping up at the proper trajectory, and hopefully that will continue. That will play a huge role.