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What is Noya?
What is Noya and can you share more about your mission?
Josh Santos - Noya is a permanent carbon removal company working to reduce the high levels of CO2 in our atmosphere and help safeguard the planet for future generations.
Our approach to direct air capture (or DAC) is unique. Alongside our high-quality carbon removal credits, we also produce clean water and grid services to support local communities as we develop projects. Our process uses abundant materials, runs in less than two hours using only electricity, and produces a significant amount of water as a byproduct. These characteristics help us navigate some of the key challenges faced by the industry today and will enable us to scale quickly over the coming years and drive down costs significantly.
We’ve assembled a team of 23 incredible scientists, engineers, and business builders to bring our first projects to life. They’re deeply motivated by the opportunity to work on a world-changing, scalable carbon removal solution. We’re honoured to be supported by pioneering organisations like Shopify, Watershed, and a confidential university endowment, all committed to growing the market for high-quality carbon removal. We’re scaling as fast as possible.
CDR Inspiration
What was the inspiration that led to your carbon removal business?
Josh Santos - I went to 13 schools in the southeastern US before going to college. Around the age of 14, my family was displaced from our home in Alabama by a hurricane during a record-setting hurricane season (we’ve had a few more of those years since then). After returning home, I remember several things that looked quite different than I remembered: a house missing a roof… the forest near my home had a new clearing created by felled trees…, and the church next to my middle school was reduced to its foundation. I still remember how I felt as I tried to figure out how this could happen, and I decided at that moment to focus on building something to address a challenge I knew little about at the time.
After graduating from MIT with a degree in Chemical Engineering, I moved to San Francisco to get my hands dirty in startups and to learn how things in the real-world actually got built. While at Tesla, I worked as a project manager for the Model 3, helping to increase its production shortly after launch. After Tesla, I joined Harley-Davidson, where I was the lead program manager for their new electric powertrains. These were both incredible experiences in learning how to manufacture things at-scale in heavily regulated industries, and those experiences greatly inform how we do things at Noya.
I was working at Harley when the COVID pandemic began and, like the rest of us, I started spending a lot more time at home. I spent that time learning about the many different solutions that people were building to help address climate change, and realized that none of these solutions were focused on the core root of the issue: the amount of CO2 in the air all around us. With my roommate - and Co-Founder - Daniel, I started thinking about different ways we might be able to capture and purify CO2 from the mixture of gasses that make up our atmosphere. We started experimenting with prototypes in our backyard, which earned us the attention of our neighbours - and eventually the San Francisco Bomb Squad. We continued this work and were able to successfully raise some early funding - and with that, Noya was born.
The carbon removal industry was just emerging around that time. Shopify and Stripe were each making their first pre-purchases, and a new wave of carbon removal companies was emerging to test exciting new chemistries and capture pathways. It’s incredible to me how much has been accomplished in the space in the last four years, but of course, there’s a lot more we need to do in the decades to come. I’m excited for Noya to help lead the industry's continued growth.
'aha' Breakthroughs
Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your business' journey that left you especially excited about its potential?
Josh Santos - Well, there have been a few of those moments along the way. The first was when Daniel and I got our prototype working in San Francisco's backyard. Carbon removal went from being reasonably abstract - in research papers we read - to something we actively participated in as we built those early devices.
Another big breakthrough moment was when Shopify selected us as part of their Sustainability Fund. We were still very early in our journey and weren’t sure whether the market for carbon removal credits would be robust enough to support Noya’s growth in the early phases of technology development. As our first buyer, and with such a significant multi-year purchase, Shopify provided us not only the financial support but also the validation in the market and, frankly, self-confidence to go all-in on a commercial approach centred around providing permanent removal credits.
And the last moment I’ll highlight is when we first started running our Joule heating tests. Joule heating is a process of heating up a material with only electricity, and how we use it provides a key advantage. Seeing those first early test results come in was electrifying (pardon the pun) for me, Daniel, and the whole team.
Investor Attention
What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?
Josh Santos - I’ll take that in two parts: investors and buyers. Investors want to understand how our technology works and its path to low energy consumption per ton of CO2 captured. This provides confidence around our ability to scale up our supply and drive the cost down over time. They want to understand our plan for scaling up projects and how we’ll execute against it. And they want to understand our ability to commercialize those projects through long-term relationships with buyers and partners. We’ve found success by sharing how large an opportunity carbon removal presents and how our unique approach to the solution design gives us confidence that we’ll be able to scale quickly to meet the needs of the market - and society - between 2030 and 2050 - and beyond.
With buyers, we tend to think about the ones who are already active and the ones who are not yet active. In the first category, these early and catalytic carbon removal buyers are laser-focused on the quality of our credits and our overall certification process. They want to understand our Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) plan and how we’re ensuring trust. They get excited about our technology's scalability and ability to deliver credits on time, while building meaningful positive relationships with the communities we will operate in. They want to ensure our project plans are more than just drawings on a proverbial whiteboard and will actually result in steel in the ground.
There's usually a good reason in the second category, buyers who aren’t yet active. Some are just developing their point of view and strategy on permanent removals. Offsets have burned some in the past, and some (many) have a lot of priorities on their plates and have been focusing on other areas. For these folks, we work to meet them where they are, to help educate them about the available options, and to provide resources so that they have good information to make decisions as they become ready - and their organizations become ready - to participate in the carbon removal market.
These are long-term relationships, and trust is essential. So, we work to establish and maintain that over time and see it as a vital part of growing the entire industry.
Scaling the Industry
How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?
Josh Santos - Scalability is integral to everything we’re building at Noya. To earn the right to get to the gigaton scale - even the megaton scale - we need to obsess over every part of our system to make sure we’re not hitting a stumbling block sometime before we reach each successive milestone.
Our modular approach is a core part of this, since we can continue to improve our module and then manufacture that thousands and eventually millions of times, improving its design and effectiveness along the way.
But it also means ensuring a robust supply chain for our key components. Our key materials are cheap and widely available, which is a critical part of our strategy. And finally, because our system is all-electric, we can be a more flexible load onto the grid and with renewable energy developers, which we believe will be a key to enable scale for carbon removal in this new era of growing energy demand.
CDR Challenges
What's the biggest challenge your business is facing in 2024, and what do you think is required to solve it?
Josh Santos - This is difficult work. After all, we’re building a brand new industry from the ground up as fast as possible. So, there are a lot of challenges - it’s difficult to pick out just one! That said… the timeline to get an infrastructure-style project - which these are - up and running depends on so many variables: permitting, community support, and clean energy procurement, to name a few.
Some of these variables are mostly - or completely - out of our control but we’re still fairly dependent on them. The permitting of Class VI wells for CO2 storage in the United States is a good example. These wells are primarily governed by the EPA, and the first ones are just making their way through this regulatory process. This pathway is critical to ensuring there’s enough capacity to store the CO2 that DAC facilities will capture as more come online and scale from 1k to 100k tons per year and beyond.
The “simple” answer is to speed up the review and permitting process with the EPA. But it’s not actually that simple. Doing this work responsibly takes time and collaboration across the public and private sectors. We believe this is critical to building trust, and trust is the key ingredient that will enable us to grow the industry at the required rate.
Into the Future
What, from an industry perspective, should we be aware of in the next 18 months to see the scale necessary to hit 2030 targets? It’s just 24 business quarters away.
Josh Santos—In the next 18 months, we need to see many more announcements of facilities going live so the industry can continue to “learn by doing.” These facilities are often labelled first-of-a-kind (FOAK) and are notoriously difficult to finance, build, and operate. In many ways, we’re entering the slightly awkward teenage years of the carbon removal industry.
Many carbon removal companies, including us, are testing their technology for the first time. We need to understand what works and what doesn't—and learn quickly to scale what does.
To your point, 2030 is just around the corner. We feel that every day here at Noya. To hit the targets the IPCC and others have set out for us, really, to ensure a healthy climate for future generations to come, we can’t afford to slow down - we collectively need to be delivering 300 million tons of carbon removal to be on track for 5 billion tons by 2050. So, we need to find ways to move even faster, whether permitting reforms, new forms of public and private funding, or other creative solutions.
It’s an incredibly exciting and energising time to do this work, and we take our responsibility to succeed very seriously.
